West Bromwich Albion need a spark that Steve Bruce doesn’t seem able to offer

West Bromwich Albion are in their second season back in the Championship following relegation and things haven’t started very positively.

When the decision was made to hire Steve Bruce as the new West Bromwich Albion manager at the start of February, chief executive Ron Gourlay was pretty clear on why.

Bruce had arrived at The Hawthorns a couple of days after the end of the January transfer window, following the sacking of Valerien Ismael, with a 2-0 defeat at Millwall having pushed them down to 7th place in the Championship table. It was the first time they’d been below the promotion or play-off places since their relegation from the Premier League at the end of the previous season.

And Gourlay was very clear. “The reason Steve is perfect for us is because we don’t have time, we need to hit the ground running,” he said, speaking of the club’s desire to get back into the race for a place in the Promised Land.

Bruce took one point from his first five games as manager, and by the time he won his first match – 3-0 at home against Peterborough United – they were in 13th.

It is, cynics may argue, this sort of joined-up thinking that has made West Bromwich Albion the club that it is today.

Last season ended with Albion in 10th place, a modest recovery in which winning their last two games – against Reading and the already-relegated Barnsley – was enough to at least lift them from the bottom half into the top.

But the idea this could constitute ‘success’ in any meaningful sense is obviously absurd. Premier League parachute payments had given West Bromwich Albion a significant advantage over most of the other teams in their division, but this had been completely squandered.

If supporters took the summer break as an opportunity to renew their optimism after a couple of extremely disappointing campaigns, the new season doesn’t seem to have started with an incredible improvement. With away matches at Middlesbrough and Blackburn Rovers and home games against Watford and Cardiff City to begin, they didn’t have an especially easy start.

The fact of the matter is that when you’re a club the size of West Bromwich Albion, who’ve spent nine of their last 12 years in the Premier League, few are going to be particularly interested in explanations or excuses when you pick up three points from your first four games of a new season and find yourselves in the Championship’s relegation places.

Bruce is now 61 years old, and in a sign of the…