West Brom's Strange History Makes Tony Pulis' the Impossible Job

On a mild day in September 2000, West Bromwich Albion welcomed Crystal Palace to the West Midlands in the old Football League Division One.

It was, nominally, a day of celebration. But sitting in the thinly populated Birmingham Road End, watching the shallow breeze tickle the corner flags before kick-off as a man in a giant throstle costume kicked balls into an empty goal, there was little to mark the occasion out as anything other than another inconsequential game at the bottom end of England's second tier between two sides whose ambition had seemingly dried up.

The afternoon marked 100 years since West Brom moved to the Hawthorns from their former home at Stoney Lane, but in spite of the club's best efforts, it was difficult for anybody inside the ground to summon much of a mood of celebration.

There was a low-key ceremony on the pitch before the game, and the match-day programme made allusions here and there to the previous century of ups and downs, but through the muted pageantry, a heavy sense of inertia penetrated, comfortingly familiar to those of us on the terraces that day.

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It isn't easy now, from the relatively lofty position of mid-table in the Premier League, to muster much of a sense of what it was like to follow the Albion back in the first year of the new millennium. There hadn't been top-flight football at the Hawthorns since 1984; a barren spell by the standards of one of the Football League's founding members, one that had brought with it the indignity of a spell in the third tier.

There was the fear that comes when any formerly great club finds itself excluded for long enough from the elite, that what started out as a temporary blip in fortunes might, in fact, be turning into the new norm.

The new Premier League had been formed, and its clubs were dividing up the new TV riches of top-level football among themselves, winning new global audiences to go with their increased exposure. Aston Villa had come within a few points of winning the inaugural Premier League title. Even Birmingham City had tasted victory at Wembley in the Auto Windscreens Shield final, and nobody on this side of the city centre had been excited about football for decades.

All of this contributes to a strange collective uncertainty around West Brom as 2017 prepares to break. This is a place with a complex and idiosyncratic past where identity has been more fluid than for almost any other club; first they were big, then they were nowhere, and now nobody seems able to say quite where they are, least of all those on the inside.

Results since November's 2-1 win away at champions Leicester have reminded Albion fans what it feels like to be upwardly mobile, and this has ignited a paradox. Suddenly the cosy familiarity of the lower third of the table feels too limiting and snug for a club that in the 1970s were perennial European challengers, and the long-dormant temptation to agitate for standards to be raised is stirring.

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The problem at the Hawthorns, certainly in the Premier League era, is that the club has never really been sure what to expect of itself. In this age of ultra-competitiveness, one where all but a ring-fenced handful of super clubs know they are one bad season away from losing their place in the top flight followed by a potentially hellish crusade to win it back, remaining in the division for what is now a seventh season is an achievement that counts.

At a time when the other bastions of West Midlands football are floundering to a lesser or greater extent, this achievement comes gilded with a coating of real pride, even if no-one in the region is deriving any pleasure from watching the sad dismantling of Coventry City.

In the middle of which, the arch-pragmatist Tony Pulis stands, arms folded, on the touchline, peering out from beneath the brim of his baseball cap into some undetermined future.

Pulis is a man who cannot win. Many at the Hawthorns would have it be known that the recent upturn in results has come in spite of the manager's methods rather than because of them, with the team buoyed by circumstances largely out of his control but for which he has taken credit.

In truth, there has been some serendipity about a run of form that saw the team climb from 17th to sixth on the back of four wins from six games.

Matt Phillips has, after a quiet start, reminded fans of why he was once considered one of the Premier League's great young promises during the season Blackpool spent in the top flight, whilst the return of Chris Brunt and James Morrison after lengthy injuries and the form of a player, in Salomon Rondon, who is looking more and more like a centre-forward playing beneath his natural level in the West Midlands have given West Brom genuine purpose in attack.

Defenders of the manager—and he does have a following who are prepared to stick up for him—will point to the role that he has played in coaxing the best from Phillips, a player whose confidence is notoriously fragile.

Pulis has done some of his best man-management work on the man he signed from Queens Park Rangers in the summer, and the results have been evident from the moment he raced away from Wes Morgan to score the winning goal at Leicester.

Brunt and Morrison have long been the linchpins around whom the team's best work is done, and Pulis was operating with one arm behind his back in their absence, whilst Rondon is little more than the striker every team in the Premier League needs in order to be successful.

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Things have worked out recently, but as recently as the second week of November, West Brom were 17th in the table. There is nothing that could be called outright discontent for the manager coming out of the stands, but most recognise this run of form for what it is, a decent set of results against sides currently placed in the bottom half.

During that spell, Albion have also lost to Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United without making an impression on any of those three games. In losing 2-0 at home to United, there was a heavy sense of inevitability that settled around the ground from the moment Zlatan Ibrahimovic headed the visitors into a fifth-minute lead, one that didn't lift until the last of a disappointed 26,000 crowd had trudged off into the night.

That there was palpable disappointment at a weak performance was a mark of how expectations had been lifted just a little in recent weeks, but the total lack of ownership over what had been felt to have been a winnable home fixture was perhaps the more telling sign that there hasn't been any lasting change here for the fans to invest in.

For the new owner Guochuan Lai, it is stick or twist. For every Leicester and Stoke City who have made changes that have brought revolutions in style and results, there is a Blackburn Rovers or a Bolton Wanderers, pushed to the peripheries by gambles that didn't pay off, not knowing now whether they'll tumble over the edge.

He may feel, like many at the Hawthorns, that Pulis is a man who, for all his pleasant likeability, cannot win.

Unfortunately for the manager, they have developed the taste for winning again here.