The Diary

16 August 2008: It's All Systems 'Go' For The Emirates

Blimey, here I go again, new season, new division ? and it still doesn?t seem five minutes since The Fart and ourselves returned from Loftus Road, full of the unparalleled joys of witnessing the club I love actually achieving that supporters? Ultimate Wet Dream, a League Championship. A feat neither The Fart or myself had ever expected to witness from any Albion first-string side in our respective lifetimes, which made the occasion all the more joyous, of course. That, plus our orbital-ball-meister friends, The Potties, having to accept second-best on the very last day. Shame, wasn?t it? So sad an occurrence, in fact, not a few Albionites actually ended up weeping copiously over a pint (or three) that very same evening. Or something like that?.

But that was then, this is now. Unlike our clay-head friends from the vicinity of M6 Junction 15, we?re not Premiership ?virgins?, so we should be fairly familiar with the beast, and all its devilish arts, by now. While they?re tossing (literally?) in their pits, recumbent minds replete with glorifying visions of Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge, and all the stellar bodies that orbit in them (not to mention artery-clogging quantities of lard) we?ll be vaguely muttering something along the lines of, ?O Christ, I wonder how bad it?s going to be this time round???

Those Potties sure have a shock coming to them: give it about three months, and I reckon they?ll be wishing like crazy they?d never bothered leaving familiar waters for the assorted maelstroms of the Prem. You?ve seen it already with our lot, so the overall scenario won?t be too strange to comprehend: a first month or so grabbing a point or three at the expense of clubs who aren?t terribly au fait with common or garden match balls assuming the heights and/or trajectories of intercontinental ballistic missiles (or being shocked rigid by Potties players not averse to ?putting themselves about a bit?, so to speak), and get overcome with a fit of the vapours the very first time Stoke stick it up ?em.

Which works fine and dandy for those opening few games, of course ? but after that, two other crucial factors come into play: a) When the time comes to engage the Premiership big boys in battle, they?ll simply treat such uncouth methods with the contempt they deserve, and b) They?ll get ?rumbled? by the rest, eventually. ?Sore-neck? type football will only get you so far in this league: without a Plan B to hand, it?s sage-and onion time (thyme?), folks. Any half-competent Prem outfit will chew them up and spit out the soggy bits. Once that happens, and those 4-0, 5-0 reverses - and worse ? start to rumble by in close succession, it?s a long and dispiriting way down. OK ? we?re likely to follow them, but by way of acceptance, I?ll simply console myself with one happy thought: if Stoke perform as badly as I think they will, that?s one less relegation place for our mob to occupy. Miracles HAVE been known to happen.

As for the close season, apart from losing all my fish to the (brief) heatwave we had around midsummer, my biggest disappointment lay in the twin departures of Zoltan Gera and Kev Phillips to Fulham and Blues respectively. No, hang on a minute ? the Phillips move was given ?wings? by virtue of the fact the Nomadic One wanted one last Big Payday with Blues, plus an extra year on his contract, the mere thought of which seemingly gave our chairman a bad case of mental indigestion. And certainly gave me a really bad case of the very same digestive complaint when I saw him pot one for Blues in the last few seconds of normal time, just the other Sunday. Phillips, not Jeremy Peace, I mean.

The Gera move? A strange one, that ? and a tad disappointing, it might be said. Why on earth someone like Zoltan would want to up sticks and move to The Smoke is quite beyond my comprehension. You can?t exactly describe Fulham as a club with prospects, can you? Well, not keeping a straight face when you say it?. The thing is, Baggie-people, at the time, I felt quite let down by it all. Had we not gone up, I would have perfectly understood the lad taking his thirty pieces of silver, then running like hell for the Mohammed Al Fayed-lined hills of West London, but as we?d already given the lad guaranteed Premiership football anyway, we could have provided Mister Gera with all the national TV exposure he?d wanted to keep his profile in the international selectors eye. So, the sticking-point had to be money, which hurt not a little, because I?d never considered for one minute that Gera would become a passenger on the same Premiership gravy-train that motivated Joe Kamara to make the same journey down the M1 after our Wembley defeat last year.

Before Gera first came to us, career-wise, he?d been heading for the rocks, and for a variety of reasons, some of which were chemically-assisted. We were the sole club that thought out of the box a little bit, actually saw past those excesses to the raw talent that burned within, gave him the second chance that many wouldn?t have even dared, and got him to the stage where he was featuring quite prominently at both domestic and international level.

Great pay-back for his erstwhile saviours, wasn?t it? Or does totally embracing the concept of ?loyalty? simply leave me with that Old Fart Mark Of Cain indelibly stamped upon my forehead, yet again? I never learn, do I? But if Fulham do crash and burn this time round ? quite possible, given the almighty struggle they had to keep above the water-line last term ? there?ll be at least one person in the Black Country having a good old-fashioned guffaw at such a drastic turn of events. Yes, I know, we?ll probably be heading the same way ourselves, but the thought of Fulham nosediving in tandem would give me that small thrill of satisfaction.

For various very good reasons, most of them connected with getting bled dry by unexpected costs incurred in our recent house-move, plus other shocking price-rises, we didn?t attend any Albion friendlies this term. But that didn?t mean football got a total heave-ho, Baggie people: last Saturday saw us in The Smoke, watching Hereford?s inaugural Division One game versus Leyton Orient instead. I suspect that just like us, they?ll have a bit of a struggle coming to terms with their somewhat novel habitat (last in that division around 20 years ago): no real strikers, limited squad, they did their best given the circumstances, taking the lead quite early on, then losing it, courtesy a goalkeeping clanger quite Crichton-esque in its execution, with Orient deservedly applying the coup de grace in the second half.

But memorable as that game might have been for United?s more excitable bovine followers, I certainly won?t forget it in a hurry. How come? Easy. Anyone who goes to games on a regular basis quickly appreciates that getting hit by the match-ball features quite prominently in any list of potential hazards commonly encountered during play. Ditto when both sides warm up, pre-kick-off, of course.

Anywhere behind the goals is tacitly accepted by all as the ?Siege Perilous?, when it comes to such matters. But at half-time, just as both sides depart the field of play for a well-earned dressing-room cuppa, and with muggins here seated well back on the halfway line, and nary a buttock plonked behind either goal? Yep ? it could only happen to me, and it did ? and, what?s more, I?ve still got the bruise to prove it! Another couple of inches higher, and I would have been patronising the local A and E Department. I?ve no idea as to which player of what persuasion actually perpetrated the dirty deed ? neither ?Im Indoors nor this column actually saw it coming! Ouch.

Quite a journey, that. From the Black Country to East London, with a somewhat convoluted return to our Herefordshire holiday home, via the M11 and Cambridge, then M6, M42 then A456, chucked in for a laugh at the end. Left London around five that afternoon, arrived around ten that night. All for a damn good reason, might I say: not only was the M25 living up to its normal billing as one vast car-park, the northbound carriageway of the M1 was rendered virtually thrombosed courtesy bloody road works ? miles of the sods. Oh, well, look on the bright side ? at least I got to find out where the Imperial War Museum?s RAF bit was located.

As for our countryside stay, that can be summed up in one very simple word: SOGGY. So extensive was the deluge this week, when we did finally venture out for a change of scenery, one sight, above all, summed up the situation perfectly. That of one mother duck, with numerous half-grown offspring in tow, quacking and cheeping furiously, meeting up with the matriarch of the resident Swan Family, her own half-grown retinue somewhat noisily following in her dignified wake ? and both adults looking perfectly fed up with having to trundle both sets of offspring around on dry land all the while! It?s when you see even the web-footed fraternity shun their normal aquatic haunts because of the rain you begin to realise the weather really has gone all to pot!

But back to the footie. Tomorrow sees The Fart and ourselves heading on out for the Emirates Stadium, and at the wrong end of a probable (very painful) blitzkrieg perpetrated courtesy the capable hands of The Gunners. Yes, I know, they?ve got several players out, and they had the minor obstacle of a preliminary round Champions League game to sort out in midweek, but given their current seasonal aspirations to topple Fergie?s crown, they?ll not want to ship daft points on the opening day, will they? If we should come away from there with even a point under our belts, it?ll be a miracle. Anything above that, and I?ll be admitting, in public, that there is a God, after all. Creationism, here I come?

As for tomorrow?s line up, I guess we?re all going to be on a pretty steep learning curve, come kick-off time. Losing two of our better performers to the great god Mammon may well transpire to be the ?killer blow? even before a ball?s kicked in anger: as things currently stand, we?re not only up against an outfit several hundred light years in front of us in terms of sheer ability, we?ll also be faced with the knotty problem of having relative strangers trying to gel as a team in the space of those opening 90 minutes ? and failing spectacularly, no doubt.

It?s one thing to get accustomed to training-ground ways, and quite another to develop any sort of decent understanding with fellow first-teamers when it?s all for real. These things take time, a commodity that?s on short rations, as far as Planet Albion is concerned. And it?s an early kick-off, just to rub liberal quantities of sodium chloride into an already festering wound. Which means an 06.30 rise from the dead for us, dear Baggie people. Time, tide and Baggies Travel coaches wait for no man (or woman). And here was me thinking that excruciating pain, both physical and mental, conducted in front of loads of hormonally-hyped up people, died out with the Romans, and their wretched Coliseum. Wrong! Back tomorrow night, of course, to tell you what went amiss at The Emirates!

YOU?VE GOT TO LAUGH, HAVEN?T YOU? Unsurprisingly, the object of mirth at the tailpiece of my inaugural offering has to be our erstwhile Championship chums situated not a dozen miles up the A41. Thanks, guys, for the rib-tickling summer story about the Dingles player recently fined by local magistrates for assaulting someone with a HANDBAG, girlies, for the use of. But, even in the midst of unmitigated mirth on receiving news of the former, there has to be a teensy soupcon of sorrow running threadlike through my words. Why? Whisper it quietly among all you Baggie people, but Tesco are shortly to discontinue giving out their distinctively-striped PLASTIC BAGS! Great wailings and gnashing of teeth in the Brummie, perchance? Now we?ll just have to think of ANOTHER way of getting the sods as mad as hell the next time we play them, won?t we? Damn.

Oh ? and I?ll take back whatever malevolent aspersions I may have cast about the Gallic persuasion over the course of recent years. On a week-long close-season break in France, we happened to visit a charming fishing port called Honfleur (think ?Brixham, Devon?, and you?ve just about got it). Which, by itself, doesn?t amount to much, but what did was the fact that I happened to be wearing my Albion shirt at the time ? and one of the locals actually stopped me in the street to have a natter about it! My spoken French isn?t up to much, and neither was this guy?s English, but the love of football being the universal lingo it is, we?d pretty soon established some kind of common ground. Turned out he?d done quite a lot of work in West Bromwich over the course of recent years, hence all the interest in the sacred stripes. Now who says the entente can?t be ?cordiale?? Had Messrs. Heath and Wilson applied the same tactics when negotiating Common Market membership terms around forty years ago, it might have saved this country a deal of trouble!

Biggest (hollow?) laugh of the last 24 hours? Nothing to do with the Baggies, this one. Just the sight of George Bush, of all people, having the sheer brass neck to stand there with a perfectly straight face, and accuse the Russians of arrogance and bullying tactics in their recent spat with Georgia! If it wasn?t so potentially serious, I?d be splitting my sides. Honest.

 - Glynis Wright

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