Some clubs occupy a peculiar place in the football firmament, but few are odder than West Bromwich Albion's. They used to be described as a yo-yo club. More accurately, they are the sporting equivalent of the laws of gravity. What goes up, as Sir Isaac Newton famously deduced, must come down again.
And that has been Albion's fate as they have alternated between the Championship and Premier League, going up only to go down soon afterwards. Elevation last year made it 11 seasons of almost constant change; four promotions, three relegations, two failed play-off campaigns and two years when they did not so much flirt with demotion as almost embrace it. The task for Roberto Di Matteo is the same as it was for Gary Megson, Bryan Robson and Tony Mowbray before him: establish Albion as a top-flight club. They have been in the top division for four seasons in the modern era, surviving once, in 2005; deemed "the Great Escape", it was a year that only produced 34 points. And that is their highest total of the Premier League era.
The club's record of 27 wins in 152 games at the highest level indicates the scale of the job for the Italian. There was an air of inevitability when Albion were last condemned to the drop in 2008/09. Mowbray's deluded idealism was swiftly exposed, the idea that passing football and dependable defending were incompatible proving flawed. Di Matteo, after one previous season in management at MK Dons, was appointed last summer to marry those purist principles with a sounder rearguard. It has been a global search for solidity, with Pablo Ibanez, the Spanish centre-back, a summer addition following Romania's Gabriel Tamas and Chile's Gonzalo Jara last season.
Their credentials face an immediate examination. They start with the most daunting trip of all, away against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Meetings with Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal are all part of their first six games. In short, it would be an achievement if Albion end September anywhere other than in the relegation zone. While the back four is the subject for scrutiny, a lack of strike power has been a constant issue during their Premier League campaigns. Robert Earnshaw struck 11 times in 2004/05; apart from that, no West Brom forward has managed more than six goals in a season.
Di Matteo has found a happy medium so far, producing a watchable but winning side. But the last decade at the club has hardly been notable for qualified successes. It has either been delight or disappointment, promotion or relegation, going up or going back down again. sports@thenational.ae
