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West Bromwich Albion F.C.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
West Bromwich Albion Full name West Bromwich Albion
Football Club
Nickname The Baggies
Founded 1878
Ground The Hawthorns,
West Bromwich
Capacity 27,877
Chairman Jeremy Peace
Manager Frank Burrows (caretaker)
Previous manager Gary Megson sacked October 26, 2004
League FA Premier League
2003-04 First Division, 2nd
West Bromwich
Albion Football Club is an English football club formed by workers from
Salter's Spring Works in West Bromwich, West Midlands in 1878.
Home Ground: The Hawthorns, since September 3, 1900
Nickname: The Baggies also the Throstles
Honours: FA Cup Winners: 1888, 1892, 1931, 1954, 1968; League Cup Winners: 1966; League Champions: 1920.
This famous football
club was one of the original founder members of the English Football
League. Although not as fashionable as some other English football
teams, over the years 'The Albion' has made a great contribution to
football. It was the first English team to play in Russia and then a
couple of decades later the first English team to play in China. During
the Chinese tour, one player was asked what he thought of the Great
Wall, his famous reply was "You've seen one wall, you've seen them
all". Their original nickname,'The Throstles' originated because they
had a thrush on their shirt badges. The more colloquial nickname and
the more popular one is 'the Baggies'. There are several theories for
how this name may have originated, a popular one being that the team
wore unfashionably long shorts at one stage.
History
Inter-war and the championship (1919 - 1939)
The war-time
diaspora of a promising young team did not stop individuals from
remaining active footballers in charity matches, amateur teams and
regional leagues. When normal competition resumed in 1919, the team was
prepared and ready for the new start and achieved the club's only
league title in 1920. However, subsequent seasons were a disappointment
as Pennington retired and the side started to break up. The mediocity
was only alleviated by a second place in the league in the season
1925/1925 when they were narrowly beaten to the title by Herbert
Chapman's phenomenal Huddersfield Town F.C..
The year 1926 saw
relegation to the second division. Ironically, relegation enabled an
achievement which is, as of 2004, unique in English football. In 1931
the club won both the FA Cup and promotion back to the top flight. The
club were only deprived of the second division championship by the
goal-scoring exploits of Dixie Dean of Everton F.C..
Though the same
players who had won promotion performed creditably in the first
division during the 1930s, the death of Billy Bassett in 1937 marked
the end of a footballing era. As the team again entered a period of
reconstruction, Albion were relegated in 1938. With the 1939/1940
season only a few games old, World War II broke out and football was
suspended.
Post-war renaissance (1945 - 1963)
Once normal league
competition was resumed in 1946 (the 1945/46 season had been organised
on a regional basis) Albion remained stuck in the Second Division. The
turning point arrived with the retirement of Everiss in 1948. Unlike
most other contemporary clubs, Albion had yet to implement the modern
role of a coach or manager. Everiss was the club's principle commercial
administrator and delivered the pre-match talk. The board selected the
team. Kicking a football played no part in training which was for
fitness alone. Albion's first modern manager was Jack Smith who took
the team back to the First Division in 1949. As England emerged into an
era of post-war prosperity, a talented new squad started to develop,
marked by the arrival of Ronnie Allen in 1950, scoring against
Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. on his home debut in front of a crowd of
60,000.
However, the board
were frustrated by the lack of trophies and Smith was dismissed in
1952. Radically, Smith was replaced by Juventus coach Jesse Carver who
introduced football into training. Though Carver was soon to be seduced
back to Italy by S.S. Lazio, his eight months in charge were a defining
moment for the club. His replacement, Vic Buckingham, recruited from
the amateur leagues, inherited an intelligent well-co-ordinated team,
playing a flowing syle of attacking football that he was to build upon.
The season 1953/1954 saw Albion win the FA Cup and finish second in the
league, behind Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., narrowly missing out on
the first English double of the 20th century.
The next couple of
seasons were, in football terms, an anticlimax for the club. However,
they also saw the arrival of players Don Howe, Derek Kevan and Bobby
Robson. From 1957 to 1961, the team played an attractive, imaginative
and stylish brand of attacking football that never quite materialised
into a trophy. In the season 1957/1958, Allen, Kevan and Robson scored
78 goals between them. With Buckingham's departure to Ajax in 1959, the
club saw another decline, Jimmy Hagan being recruited to arrest the
slide in 1963.
Astle and after (1964 - 1977)
September 1964 saw
the arrival of striker Jeff Astle from Notts County F.C.. Over the next
decade, Astle was to become the club's most iconic player ever. The
club was already feeling the dramatic social changes of the 1960s,
tangibly through falling attendancies and the end of the players'
maximum wage. Hagan was, despite the spirit of the times, a martinet on
the training ground and frequently bred conflict with a playing squad
beginning to enjoy the decade's economic and social freedoms. However,
he shrewdly built the team in personel and skill, leading them to a
League Cup triumph in 1966.
The following season
was a hollow disappointment with Albion losing in the final of the
League Cup to Third Division Queens Park Rangers F.C., making an early
exit from their first European campaign and struggling to maintain
their place in the First Division. Had Hagan had more friends at the
Hawthorns, he might have been given time to fix the problems but, in
1967, he was replaced by Alan Ashman. Ashman led Albion to FA Cup
victory in 1968, Astle becoming the first player to score in every
round, but subsequently, despite some exciting cup runs, the manager
could not deliver the trophies the club craved.
Don Howe seemed the
perfect replacement for Ashman when he arrived as manager in 1971. A
former Albion player, he had just coached Arsenal FC to their league
and cup double and was regarded as one of the games foremost
theoreticians. However, theory proved no match for practice, the club
being relegated to the Second Division in 1973. Failure to achieve
promotion back the following season and the departure of Astle in 1974
seemed to presage a gloomy future. Fortuitiously, Albion was gifted by
the short leaderships of Johnny Giles and Ronnie Allen who began the
work of rebuilding the team. Sadly, the club was insuffucently
ambitious and prescient to work hard at securing either's long
term-services.
The Atkinson era (1978 - 1981)
When unknown young
manager Ron Atkinson arrived at the club in 1978, he inherited a team
that already included youth-team graduate Bryan Robson and the young,
gifted and black pair of Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis, both
acquired inexpensively from lower divisions.
Aware that he had
the makings of a great team, he augmented it by bringing Brendan Batson
from his former club Cambridge United F.C.. Never before had an English
team simultaneously fielded three black players and the Three Degrees,
as they became known in reference to the contemporary vocal trio of the
same name, challenged the established racism of English football and
marked a watershed that allowed a generation of footballers to enter
the game who would previously have been excluded by their ethnic
background.
Atkinson's team
played some of the most exciting football in England during his term at
the club but, as early as 1978, the board allowed the playing talent to
start slipping away, Cunningham's move to Real Madrid marking the start
of the trend. The club managed 3rd and 4th places in the First Division
and, more than once, reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup but trophies
narrowly eluded them.
Following the tragic
death of director Tom Silk in a plane crash, the club fell again under
the conservative leadership of Bert Millichip and Atkinson, despairing
of the support he needed to build and maintain a winning team, took the
vacant manager's post at Manchester United F.C. in the summer of 1981.
Decline and fall (1982 - 1999)
Atkinson's graceless
departure was a savage blow to the club, especially when he attracted
some of the club's best players, such as Bryan Robson, to follow him to
Manchester. Though West Brom were still a leading team in the top
flight of English football, they failed to attract the sort of
managerial talent that would have taken them forward. The 1980s were a
time of austerity in the West Midlands as the radical economic
restructing, known as Thatcherism, led to the decline of traditional
industries. The falling wealth of the supporter base was reflected in
increasing financial difficulties for the club and a collapse in
performance leading them to relegation to the Second Division in 1986
and, for the first time in their history, to the Third Division in 1991.
There were some
brief false-dawns. A second spell under Atkinson saw some improvement
on the pitch. The short-lived management of Osvaldo Ardiles achieved a
1993 promotion back to the second-tier, now newly named the First
Division. Ray Harford's flirtation as manager offered some hope but
personal reasons stood in the way of a long-lived commitment to the
club. There seemed no path out of the lower reaches of the league.
The Megson era (2000 - 2004)
Towards the end of
1999, dissatisfaction with the commercial management of the club led
Paul Thompson, the principal financial backer, to challenge the
chairmanship of Tony Hale. By early 2000, Thompson was chairman and set
about reforming the club's finances and arresting the team's decline
back towards the Second Division. Gary Megson arived as manager on
March 11, 2000 and saved the club from relegation by a crucial win on
the final day of the season. The 2000/2001 season saw the club in the
First Division play-offs and, the following season, promoted to the FA
Premier League for the first time. The promotion was won on the last
day of the season, after a dramatic run-in that included the notorious
Battle of Bramall Lane. The team displaced bitter local rivals
Wolverhampton Wanderers in the promotion places, their 10 point lead
having been overturned in the final 10 games.
However, the
promotion had been largely unanticipated by the club and forward
planning had been limited. Moreover, immediately following promotion, a
bitter quarrel developed between Thompson and Megson. There ensued a
boardroom battle in which Jeremy Peace finally emerged as chairman but
much vital time had been lost in building a team for the Premiership
campaign. Moreover, a dispute with the players arose when Peace sort to
renegotiate personal contracts which he belived to be financially
imprudent. Unsurprisingly, the club was relegated in 2003 but, unlike
so many in a similar position, with sound finances on which to build a
team for a further campaign. On April 24, 2004 the club secured
promotion back to the Premiership with four games of the season still
to play. However, the club's 2004-05 season started poorly. After
informing the board that he would not re-sign with the club beyond the
end of the season, Megson was dismissed on October 26, 2004.
List of managers
Jack Smith, (1948 - 1952)
Jesse Carver, (1952)
Vic Buckingham, (1952 - 1959)
Gordon Clark, (1959 - 1961)
Archie Macaulay, (1961 - 1963)
Jimmy Hagan, (1963 - 1967)
Alan Ashman, (1967 - 1971)
Don Howe, (1971 - 1975)
Johnny Giles, (1975 - 1977)
Ronnie Allen, (1977)
Ron Atkinson, (1978 - 1981)
Ronnie Allen, (1981 - 1982)
Ron Wylie, (1982 - 1984)
Johnny Giles, (1984 - 1985)
Ron Saunders, (1986 - 1987)
Ron Atkinson, (1987 - 1988)
Brian Talbot, (1988 - 1991)
Bobby Gould, (1991 - 1992)
Osvaldo Ardiles, (1992 - 1993)
Keith Burkinshaw, (1993 - 1994)
Alan Buckey, (1994 - 1997)
Ray Harford, (1997)
Denis Smith, (1997 - 2000)
Brian Little, (2000)
Gary Megson, (2000 - 2004)
List of chairmen
...
Sir Bert Millichip, (1974 - 1983)
Sid Lucas, (1983 - 1988)
John Silk, (1988 - 1992)
Trevor Summers, (1992 - 1994)
Tony Hale, (1994 - 2000)
Paul Thompson, (2000 - 2002)
Jeremy Peace, (2002 - )
External links:
Official site
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