West Bromwich Albion F.C. |
West Bromwich Albion Football Club is an English football club formed by workers from Salter's Spring Works in
West Bromwich, West Midlands in 1878.
Home Ground: The Hawthorns, since September 3, 1900
Nickname: The Baggies also the Throstles
Honours: FA Cup Winners: 1888, 1892, 1931, 1954, 1968; League Cup Winners: 1966; League Champions: 1920.
This famous football club was one of the original founder members of the English Football League. Although not as fashionable as some other English football teams,
over the years 'The Albion' has made a great contribution to football. It was the first English team to play in Russia and then a
couple of decades later the first English team to play in China. During the Chinese tour, one player was asked what he thought of
the Great Wall, his famous reply was "You've seen one wall, you've seen them all". Their original nickname,'The Throstles'
originated because they had a thrush on their shirt badges. The more colloquial nickname and the more popular one is 'the
Baggies'. There are several theories for how this name may have originated, a popular one being that the team wore unfashionably
long shorts at one stage.
At a glance
History
Fin de siecle (1878 - 1914)
...to be done
Inter-war and the championship (1919 - 1939)
The war-time diaspora of a promising young team did not stop individuals from remaining active footballers in charity matches,
amateur teams and regional leagues. When normal competition resumed in 1919, the team was
prepared and ready for the new start and achieved the club's only league title in 1920.
However, subsequent seasons were a disappointment as Pennington retired and the side started to break up. The mediocity was only
alleviated by a second place in the league in the season 1925/1925 when they were narrowly beaten to the title by Herbert
Chapman's phenomenal Huddersfield Town F.C..
The year 1926 saw relegation to the second division. Ironically, relegation enabled an
achievement which is, as of 2004, unique in English football. In 1931 the club won both the FA Cup and promotion back to
the top flight. The club were only deprived of the second division championship by the goal-scoring exploits of Dixie Dean of Everton F.C..
Though the same players who had won promotion performed creditably in the first division during the 1930s, the death of Billy Bassett in 1937 marked the end of a footballing era. As the team again entered a period of reconstruction,
Albion were relegated in 1938. With the 1939/1940 season only a few games old, World War
II broke out and football was suspended.
Post-war renaissance (1945 - 1963)
Once normal league competition was resumed in 1946 (the 1945/46 season had been organised on a regional basis) Albion remained stuck in the Second Division. The turning point arrived
with the retirement of Everiss in 1948. Unlike most other contemporary clubs, Albion had
yet to implement the modern role of a coach or manager. Everiss was the club's principle commercial administrator and delivered
the pre-match talk. The board selected the team. Kicking a football played no part in training which was for fitness alone.
Albion's first modern manager was Jack Smith who took the team back to the First Division in 1949. As England emerged into an era
of post-war prosperity, a talented new squad started to develop, marked by the arrival of Ronnie Allen in 1950, scoring against Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. on his home debut in
front of a crowd of 60,000.
However, the board were frustrated by the lack of trophies and Smith was dismissed in 1952. Radically, Smith was replaced by Juventus coach Jesse Carver who introduced football into training. Though Carver was soon to be
seduced back to Italy by S.S. Lazio,
his eight months in charge were a defining moment for the club. His replacement, Vic Buckingham, recruited from the amateur leagues, inherited an intelligent well-co-ordinated team, playing
a flowing syle of attacking football that he was to build upon. The season 1953/1954 saw Albion win the FA Cup and finish second in the
league, behind Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., narrowly missing out on the first English double of the 20th century.
The next couple of seasons were, in football terms, an anticlimax for the club. However, they also saw the arrival of players
Don Howe, Derek Kevan and Bobby Robson. From 1957 to 1961, the team played an attractive, imaginative and stylish brand of attacking football that never
quite materialised into a trophy. In the season 1957/1958, Allen, Kevan and Robson scored
78 goals between them. With Buckingham's departure to Ajax in 1959, the club saw another decline, Jimmy Hagan being recruited to arrest the slide in 1963.
Astle and after (1964 - 1977)
September 1964 saw the arrival of striker Jeff Astle from Notts County F.C.. Over the next
decade, Astle was to become the club's most iconic player ever. The club was already feeling the dramatic social changes of the
1960s, tangibly through falling attendancies and the end of the players' maximum wage. Hagan was, despite the spirit of the times, a martinet on the
training ground and frequently bred conflict with a playing squad beginning to enjoy the decade's economic and social freedoms.
However, he shrewdly built the team in personel and skill, leading them to a League
Cup triumph in 1966.
The following season was a hollow disappointment with Albion losing in the final of the League Cup to Third Division Queens Park Rangers F.C., making an early exit from their
first European campaign and struggling to maintain their place in the First Division. Had Hagan had more friends at the
Hawthorns, he might have been given time to fix the problems but, in 1967, he was replaced
by Alan Ashman. Ashman led Albion to FA Cup victory in 1968, Astle becoming the first player to score in every round, but subsequently, despite some exciting cup runs,
the manager could not deliver the trophies the club craved.
Don Howe seemed the perfect
replacement for Ashman when he arrived as manager in 1971. A former Albion player, he had
just coached Arsenal FC to their league and cup double and was regarded as one
of the games foremost theoreticians. However, theory proved no match for practice, the club being relegated to the Second Division in 1973. Failure to achieve promotion back the following season and the departure of Astle in 1974 seemed to presage a gloomy future. Fortuitiously, Albion was gifted by the short leaderships of Johnny Giles and Ronnie Allen who began the work of rebuilding the team. Sadly, the
club was insuffucently ambitious and prescient to work hard at securing either's long term-services.
The Atkinson era (1978 - 1981)
When unknown young manager Ron Atkinson arrived at the club in 1978, he inherited a team that already included youth-team graduate Bryan Robson and the young, gifted and black pair of Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis, both
acquired inexpensively from lower divisions.
Aware that he had the makings of a great team, he augmented it by bringing Brendan Batson from his former club Cambridge United F.C.. Never before had an English team simultaneously fielded three black players
and the Three Degrees, as they became known in reference to the contemporary vocal trio of the same name, challenged the established racism of English football and
marked a watershed that allowed a generation of footballers to enter the game who would previously have been excluded by their
ethnic background.
Atkinson's team played some of the most exciting football in England during his term at the club but, as early as 1978, the board allowed the playing talent to start slipping away, Cunningham's move to Real Madrid marking the start of the trend. The club managed 3rd and 4th places in
the First Division and, more than once, reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup but trophies narrowly eluded them.
Following the tragic death of director Tom Silk in a plane crash, the club fell again under the conservative leadership of
Bert Millichip and Atkinson, despairing of the support he needed to build and maintain a winning team, took the vacant manager's
post at Manchester United F.C. in the summer of
1981.
Decline and fall (1982 - 1999)
Atkinson's graceless departure was a savage blow to the club, especially when he attracted some of the club's best players,
such as Bryan Robson, to follow him to Manchester. Though West Brom were still a leading team in the top flight of English
football, they failed to attract the sort of managerial talent that would have taken them forward. The 1980s were a time of austerity in the West Midlands as the radical economic restructing, known as Thatcherism, led to the decline of traditional industries. The falling wealth of the
supporter base was reflected in increasing financial difficulties for the club and a collapse in performance leading them to
relegation to the Second Division in 1986 and, for the first time in their history, to the
Third Division in 1991.
There were some brief false-dawns. A second spell under Atkinson saw some improvement on the pitch. The short-lived management
of Osvaldo Ardiles achieved a 1993 promotion back to the second-tier, now newly named the First Division. Ray Harford's flirtation as manager offered some hope but personal reasons stood in the way of a
long-lived commitment to the club. There seemed no path out of the lower reaches of the league.
The Megson era (2000- )
Towards the end of 1999, dissatisfaction with the commercial management of the club led
Paul Thompson, the principal financial backer, to challenge the chairmanship of Tony Hale. By early 2000, Thompson was chairman and set about reforming the club's finances and arresting the team's decline back towards
the Second Division. Gary Megson
arived as manager on March 11, 2000 and saved the club from relegation by a crucial
win on the final day of the season. The 2000/2001 season saw the club in the First Division
play-offs and, the following season, promoted to the FA Premier
League for the first time. The promotion was won on the last day of the season, displacing bitter local rivals Wolverhampton
Wanderers F.C. in the promotion places, their 10 point lead having been overturned in the final 10 games of the season.
However, the promotion had been largely unanticipated by the club and forward planning had been limited. Moreover, immediately
following promotion, a bitter quarrel developed between Thompson and Megson. There ensued a boardroom battle in which Jeremy
Peace finally emerged as chairman but much vital time had been lost in building a team for the Premiership campaign. Moreover, a
dispute with the players arose when Peace sort to renegotiate personal contracts which he belived to be financially imprudent.
Unsurprisingly, the club was relegated in 2003 but, unlike so many in a similar position,
with sound finances on which to build a team for a further campaign. On April 24,
2004 the club secured promotion back to the Premiership with four games of the season still
to play.
List of managers
- ...
- Ron Atkinson, (1978 - 1981)
- Ronnie Allen, (1981 - 1982)
- Ron Wylie, (1982 - 1984)
- Johnny Giles, (1984 - 1985)
- Ron Saunders, (1986 - 1987)
- Ron Atkinson, (1987 - 1988)
- Brian Talbot, (1988 -
1991)
- Bobby Gould, (1991 - 1992)
- Osvaldo Ardiles, (1992 - 1993)
- Keith Burkinshaw,
(1993 - 1994)
- Alan Buckey, (1994 - 1997)
- Ray Harford, (1997)
- Denis Smith, (1997 - 2000)
- Brian Little, (2000)
- Gary Megson, (2000 - )
List of chairmen
- ...
- Sir Bert Millichip, (1974 -
1983)
- Sid Lucas, (1983 - 1988)
- John Silk, (1988 - 1992)
- Trevor Summers, (1992 - 1994)
- Tony Hale, (1994 - 2000)
- Paul Thompson, (2000 - 2002)
- Jeremy Peace, (2002 - )
External links
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