FAN’S VIEW  2025/26 – WEST BROM AWAY

Pre-match – trying to be positive but it’s difficult

Now that I’m just doing the FVs for the away games I was expecting the other fella to have the more positive performances on which to comment, given our form last season at the Kassam and on our travels, leaving me with something a little more dispiriting with which to work.

That’s not how it has worked out thus far into the 25/26 campaign though has it? Our home form is terrible. If it does not improve relegation will be a certainty.

Away though we’ve already got as many wins as we did in total last season so I travelled to the West Midlands with at least as much hope as I take with me to OX4. And I’ve convinced myself Albion, even on their own patch, won’t be as good as Stoke were when they hammered us last Tuesday.  That Albion had not scored in three games was a bit of a worry. Bound to break that run against us weren’t they? In the same way that the Blades got their first win when they visited. Inevitable. Seems like it is always us but I’m convinced most football fans think that way, particularly when their team is going through a sticky patch.

Match day travel and beers

Driving to away games can be such a bind and is becoming increasingly less appealing as one gets older but it can still be the best option if the trains don’t fit the bill. Engineering works; leaves on the line; driver not turned up; landslip; too few carriages; only one train every few hours; extortionate fares.

None of that here. 10:17 from Bicester – that’s where the train actually started on this occasion because south of my home town there were indeed engineering works. I don’t care; I’m alright Jack.

I’ve got a railcard but when one of your party isn’t a senior three for the price of two does the job. £21.20 to the Hawthorns is acceptable. My mate had got my tickets. With the journey well underway I asked him for them to be told he’d sent them to me via email. I’m pretty crap locating emails on my phone but managed it and also got them into my Google wallet. When I say “them” it was all six tickets that came with the email. We now had to work out who was using which ticket.

We left Moor Street station just gone 11:30 with no problem negotiating the ticket barrier. We were soon struck by the number of police about. The immediate thought was what other local games are on other than us at West Brom, or what clubs’ fans may be passing through. The only two others we saw supporting a different club were a father and son in the Wellington wearing the yellow of Belper Town on their way to Sutton Coldfield. They will have gone home happier than us having won their Northern Premier League Midlands Division game 3-0. Crowd 220.

But back to the reason why the police were so visible. From the national news we’ve been informed that the previous night a woman was subjected to an unprovoked attack close to New Street Station and that she subsequently died. Words fail me. Incidents like this and the mass indiscriminate stabbings on the LNER train bound for King’s Cross on 1 November put football into perspective. There but for the grace of God.

The Wellington was our first port of call not only because it is a cracking pub but because it opens at 10:00 am. Second time already we’ve visited this season. A Black Country Ales local where prices on the day seemed very cheap. For £8.55 I got two and a half pints. The Pig on the Wall (Strong Mild – 4.3% abv but that is strong for a mild) was nectar.

Less than 200 yards away is the Colmore, converted from a former bank in a Grade II listed building. It’s a Thornbridge tap and again there was an excellent range of quality beers on offer. 3.4% abv is low alcohol but that was the strength of my pint. All about the taste not the power.

I was told that I’d been in the Colmore before but only have a vague recollection. The final beer stop was all of four minutes away and was definitely a new pub for me. So many pubs over so many years. The Good Intent is in the Great Western Arcade which is also Grade II listed. Whatever our fans feel obliged to sing not all of Birmingham “is a shit hole”. Far from it. The Good Intent is run by Craddocks whose beers are currently brewed by the Birmingham Brewing Company. Again, the beer was excellent and the barman really knowledgeable on the subject of what he was serving. We could have had a free pint if we’d been willing to go upstairs for a free health check. We declined but it was an interesting offer and one I’ve never come across before. I’d enough to worry about with the football ahead without being told that as an old bloke I’d got x, y, and z to concern me. The pub lives up to its name; it is a not-for-profit pub with all of its profits donated to charities and good causes. Now just imagine if the world’s richest people had the same attitude (the top 1% owns more wealth than 95% of humanity apparently).

I can’t recall the last time I went to three pubs that were so good, so close together, serving such good beer from independents. But we had to move on, there was a football match to attend. It only took about a minute to walk to Snow Hill station. Ticket scanned and entered no problem. Not so for my mate. Ha! Turns out I’d used his ticket to get in, so he had to use mine.

Another disappointing 90 plus minutes

This was Albion’s chosen dedicated remembrance fixture. The teams were led out by “Blind Dave” Heeley and three soldiers. We had the last post and minute’s silence which gives us a short time for deep contemplation.

It’s worth looking up what Dave Heeley has achieved. There’s been a film made about his seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. Not bad for someone who is completely blind.

On to the actual football though – I suppose I have to. That’s why I was there after all.

The stats are one thing and what we see before our eyes and how we interpret that through our yellow tinted specs is another.

On some measures there wasn’t a lot in it but Albion had 62% of the possession. They had 26 shots and we had nine. This suggests they were the dominant side and that’s how I saw it. Their passing accuracy was 83.2% ours was 71.5% which is quite some difference. This indicates that we’re not good enough to keep the ball at this level. I’ve noted that in tight situations opponents are much more capable of playing their way out than we are. They won 81.8% of their tackles. We managed to do so just 53.3% of the time. That along with our poorer passing will be the main reasons why they had so much more of the ball than we did.

I’ve not yet been properly sold on this xG thing but if rounding comes into play here it gives the actual score. Theirs was 1.57, ours 0.95.

We could have scored early on but didn’t. We got to half time with the game goal-less although I wasn’t much impressed with what we were producing. That said I’d have been well satisfied if the second half had continued in the same vein with the same outcome. Albion weren’t the best team we’ve played recently.

We hadn’t created much and had not looked like worrying the man keeping the score but with the second period not 10 minutes old we took the lead in front of our own fans. Big bonus.

Shemmy Placheta received the ball on the halfway line on the right wing. On the opposite flank Will Lankshear was free. He called for the pass almost immediately. Placheta kept coming and then accelerated past his marker who never got close enough to thwart the run. When he got ten yards from the by-line and was just outside the area the perfect ball was then squared. By now Lankshear had made his way, still unmarked, into the heart of the penalty area and met the ball perfectly with a side-foot finish into the roof of the net from the edge of the six-yard box. From our perspective a well worked goal. Baggies fans will have bemoaned poor defensive play.

It was now ours to throw away. What were we made of to ensure that didn’t happen?

Nothing much as it happens. Two minutes later we were no longer ahead. Then less than a quarter of an hour later we were behind. Bugger.

I keep saying that we’ve got a better squad this season than last and I’m not the only one. There’s also been a debate on how good the Championship is this season compared with last. Initially I thought it’s better, which could explain where we’re at but having seen a few games on Sky I began to question that opinion. I think those that have pointed out that the quality at the top of the table in 25/26 is not as good as it was in 24/25, which saw Leeds, Burnley and Sunderland promoted, are right. None of those teams are currently in the Premier League’s relegation places (could be a different story come May 2026 though). At the bottom of the table the quality is perceived as being better than it was last time around which doesn’t help us one bit even if Sheffield Wednesday are already goners thanks to their 12-point deduction.

I really thought we’d got any defensive issues just about sorted but that’s far from true. Having now let in seven goals in three games something must be amiss.

The equaliser came when Alex Mowatt found Mikey Johnston out wide on the left. Sam Long never got close enough to stop Johnston doing what he wanted to do as he progressed at pace. Another Albion player, Callum Styles, was going even quicker off the ball with Brian De Keersmaecker in his wake. Styles received the pass deep in our area and hit it towards goal/cut it back across the six-yard box. Jamie Cumming stretched and desperately pushed the ball away only for it to go flying off Greg Leigh into the goal. In all this I’d also question Michal Helik. With BDK struggling to go with Styles I would have expected him to step to his right and make it more difficult for the attacking side. He wasn’t marking anyone and was never in a position to cut out the pass. I may have got this all wrong of course. These guys are going to understand how to defend against a Championship attack much better than an old guy in the stands who has never played football other than at a very low level. But something doesn’t seem right.

The home side’s winner was built down the other side. Again, a wide man received the ball with a yellow shirt being the wrong side to make himself a nuisance. Again, an off the ball runner wasn’t picked up. I thought Ciaron Brown was a bit slow in attempting to block the cross. The scorer, Norwegian Aune Heggebo, was sharper than Helik. It was a good angled headed finish.

After every game that we’ve lost – and there’s a lot of them – my mate goes “so what were the positives?”. It is a fair question to ask but after this my thoughts were that whatever positives there were had been more than dwarfed by the negatives. And whatever positives we demonstrated were trumped (not a word I like using these days) by the Albion positives.

Overall, I thought they were quicker and more switched on than we were. Whatever they were doing and looked capable of doing I’d say we were only about 80% of that.

Obviously new players take time to settle in. Whenever I see someone in the yellow of OUFC for the first time I have a natural inclination to focus on the positives. So far I’ve seen things that impressed me from De Keersmaeker, Nik Prelec and Filip Krastev. There’s some marvellous skill there, but and this is a big BUT – at present the pace of the Championship appears to be a bit too much for them to shine. The leagues they have come from do not have the same intensity.

We have players that we know are very inconsistent and rarely show as a threat from start to finish, if they last that long, in games. Players that frustrate but on the odd occasion have us purring. I’m thinking Siriki Dembele and Placheta. The latter of course got that wonderful equaliser against Millwall and was instrumental in setting up our goal here. Why can’t he do this more often? Well, he’s got defenders trying to stop him and he is what he is. If he was better than that he’d likely not be at our club. We are what we are.

Wait, there are positives. Not enough to lighten my mood but enough to realise it isn’t quite total doom and gloom. I’ll start with a couple of players.

Cameron Brannagan showed us that he really can hit a ball accurately from distance and work the goalkeeper. There’s not many better at this in the Championship when he’s on it. He got 13 league goals in our promotion season including that pressure penalty at Peterborough, but last season only got three in 33 appearances. This time he’s already scored four in the 15 games.

Then there’s Will Lankshear. He’s got one more than Cam. Bear in mind that he’s not being fed a huge number of chances. Mark Harris and Leigh, our joint leading scorers last campaign, only got six.

This was back to our normal margin of defeat, by just the one goal, which was an improvement on the previous game but any loss is exactly that, no points gained. 

A final positive is that we are still not in the bottom three. We certainly will be soon though unless we up our game.

For all this I have not thrown the towel in and still think Gary Rowett is the man for the job. This “Gary Rowett your football is shit” chant was bad enough when it was being sung by opposition fans but to hear it from a few of our own as they were leaving the ground is another thing altogether. It doesn’t help. And what do these people expect? We’re a small club in this tier of English football. We’ll have one of the smallest budgets around. I’m not sure what more he can do with the resources at his disposal. Individual errors are not down to him. Recruitment?

Perhaps I’m being too defensive of him but at this point in time I don’t think so.

Homeward Bound

The same as last year we were all herded the same way and that had meant we had to wait to get to the car. A bit annoying and not a policy I’ve seen at other clubs recently. This time for me though, no problem as no car. I alighted in Bicester at 19:00. For some though there may have been an issue. We were held outside the station until 17:20 whilst WBA supporters marched freely onto the platform and their way home. If it had been pouring down with rain it would have been unpleasant. Likewise, if anyone had planned on using the station toilets as soon as they arrived. Not me though I’d taken advantage of the facilities in the ground before leaving. I may be wrong but I got the impression that there were a handful of Oxford supporters who wanted trains going in the opposition direction to the centre of Birmingham, which was where the train they’d designated especially for us was heading, but were not allowed to leave the main group.

What next

Every game is a big game, but the next two are massive. Both of our opponents, one at each end of the table, have had recent managerial changes.

Now though we’ve got a week off when we can relax thanks to international fixtures. Then it will all be back on again and as tense as ever.

Football I bloody hate it. Yet I love it. Don’t know where I’d be without it.