West Bromwich Albion have undergone a transformation since the arrival of Carlos Corberan, but the club has questions to answer over its financial position.
West Bromwich Albion were always going to be playing second fiddle on their pre-Christmas trip to Coventry City. Terry Hall, a Manchester United supporter but still one of Coventry’s most celebrated sons, had died a couple of days earlier, and the home side laid on a touching tribute to the singer which the team followed up by winning the game 1-0.
This result ended a run of wins that had breathed a little bit of life back into Albion’s season. A home defeat by Sheffield United at the end of October had dropped them to the bottom of the Championship, two and a half weeks after the almost completely unsurprising departure of Steve Bruce. The team had reacted fairly positively to Bruce’s absence, picking up a win in their first match under caretaker Richard Beale, but the Sheffield United game – the first match in charge for new permanent manager Carlos Corberan – had given an indication of how much work the new manager had to do.
But since then, Corberan has started to get a tune out of this hitherto malfunctioning squad of players. Between the Sheffield United game and the Coventry City game Albion won five in a row, scoring nine goals and conceding just one. Those five wins more than doubled the team’s points tally for the season, taking them from 14 to 29 in just six weeks, a figure all the more remarkable when we consider that they didn’t even play any league games between the 12th November and the 12th December. The run lifted them the giddy heights to 16th place in the table.
There have been clouds over the The Hawthorns over much of 2022. On the 11th December 2021 they were in third place in the Championship table, a position they’d been more or less occupying since the very start of the season. By the middle of March they were in 14th, a quick return to the Premier League following relegation at the end of the previous season. They recovered to 10th place in the table, but this had not been the return to the Championship that many had been expecting. Steve Bruce had been appointed as manager at the start of February, replacing Valerien Ismael amid many online warnings from Newcastle United supporters over what they might expect. Those warnings, it turned out, were not without merit.
But if the departure of Bruce from The Hawthorns lifted one cloud that had been hanging…
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