1st February 2006: Following the closure of the transfer window, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst some Albion fans with regards to the performance of Jeremy Peace and Bryan Robson in the transfer window. In my opinion, most of it is overreaction and unrealistic expectation of a club in Albion's position and with Albion's finances. I was going to pen my thoughts, but I felt that they were eloquently expressed by TPBaggie, a poster on WBAZone.com, and he has kindly agreed to allow me to publish his comments here.



To get one major bone of contention out of the way right from the outset, Earnshaw had to go and it was right that we sell him now, irrespective of whether we had another striker lined up to replace him or not.

I watched Earnshaw being interviewed about his move to Norwich on Sky Sports News last night, while waiting to see if there was to be any news about a last-minute deal for a new striker, and what came across most strongly from his comments was his belief that his goal scoring record alone was sufficient to justify a regular place in the side. He may well feel that way, but the record books simply do not back up that view.

Earnshaw’s eleven goals last season netted us two wins and three draws, a total of nine points – and of course those were important.

Against that, however, you have to assess the contributions of other players: Gera’s six goals provided one win and three draws, Clement scored three times and we came away with crucial points on every occasion (one win and two draws) while Horsfield scored the same number of goals as Clement and delivered two wins, including the vital first goal against Pompey.

Goals alone will not keep us in the Premiership. We need them, of course, but there is more to this need than mere quantity. As evidence of that Palace’s Andy Johnson was the second highest goalscorer in the Premiership last season with twenty goals – a mere four behind Thierry Henry – Peter Crouch and Kevin Phillips accounted for twenty-two of Southampton’s forty-five goals (nine more than we scored), while Norwich were the only team at the bottom to lay out big money on a striker (Dean Ashton) in the hope that it would keep them in the Premiership…

…and yet all those teams were relegated.

Or perhaps you would prefer the evidence from the seventeen one-nil victories that took us to promotion.

Or how about, Blackburn’s record last season in scoring four fewer goals than we managed (thirty-two), yet still finished eight points ahead of us.

However important goals might be, they are still less important than putting points on the board – at the end of the season, our recent one-nil win at Wigan and our nil-nil draw with Charlton will be of infinitely more value to us than any number of three-two and four-three defeats, no matter how many goals our strikers may score in such games. Staying in the Premiership is not about scoring more goals that your rivals at the bottom, its about gaining more points and, more often than not, it not necessarily the team that wins most games that stays up, but the one that loses least often.

Earnshaw’s goals came against a backdrop of near constant complaints from fans about his failure to contribute anything else of substance to the team other than his goals. Even on his best days there were always ‘buts’ about his performance:

‘But’ his first touch was poor;

‘But’ he was a passenger for most of the game until he scored;

‘But’ his positioning was off and he couldn't get on the same wavelength as Kanu.

We may not always agree with Robson, but in this case it seems obvious that he saw, in Earnshaw, what we all saw - a decent finisher who's all round game is not up to life in the top flight, and if that's been our view all along, then why complain at him going?

Most important of all, Earnshaw became disenchanted with life at the Hawthorns and made it obvious to everyone, not just by putting in a transfer request, but with his abysmal, disinterested performance against Reading. Such a performance from any professional footballer is unacceptable, even if they are intent on leaving a club. In fact, for a player looking to move on, such a performance is even more unforgivable than normal; the Reading game was Earnshaw’s chance to put himself in the shop window and attract the attention of other clubs, and yet he blew it; no, more than that, he simply couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to try and take it.

Whatever else you may think of him, that kind of attitude in the dressing room is poison to a club in our current position. It is corrosive; it eats away at team spirit and player morale, both of which will be crucial if we are to survive this season.

That alone is reason enough to let him go, given a fair offer for his services, and that is what we got from Norwich – it is not, however, what we may have got had we retained his services to the end of the season and the next transfer window, not merely because time remaining on contracts is now a major factor in determining transfer fees and Earnshaw would, by then, have only one year proper left on his present deal, but also because this summer we have football’s biggest and best shop window taking place, the World Cup, and who is to say how the opportunity that presents to scout new players, particularly those from smaller nations who are largely unknown to the English game at present, might affect his value.

Given the choice of an unhappy and unmotivated player in the dressing room or a £3.5 million deal, which would you take if you were Bryan Robson or Jeremy Peace?

It’s not such a tough decision when you look at it like that.

Turning to the general matter of our dealings in the transfer market, and ignoring the obvious disappointment in our not bringing in a striker to replace Earnshaw, the question we should be asking is what, exactly have we achieved.

Well, for starters, we’ve offloaded a number of squad players; Scimeca, Moore and Dyer - with Horsfield possibly to go as well once Kanu and Kamara return from the African Nations Cup – players whose first team chances, given a fully fit squad, would be somewhere from limited to non-existent. One can even make the same argument in respect of Earnshaw in the sense that, for much of this season, he’s been our fifth choice striker – and the only reason that’s not sixth choice is because we’ve been playing Kamara in midfield as cover for Gera’s injury problems.

Against that we’ve strengthened the team in areas where we know there have been weaknesses for much of the season, adding a much needed central defender (Martinez), an all-action ball-winning midfielder (Quashie) and a playmaker (Kozak) to give us – hopefully – much more of the threat going forward and better service to the strikers we’ve retained. Were it not for the Earnshaw deal and the rumours that Shatskikh might be on his way as a surprise deal, I doubt we’d consider this anything less than a job well done by the club.

I don’t accept the contention that we should have been ‘better prepared’ for the possibility of Earnshaw moving on. It has been clear from the outset of this transfer window that any significant signings would be on condition that we clear the decks of other players who no longer feature in Robson’s plans; that in order to buy, we would have to sell first. Even if we had a back-up plan, whether it was Shatskikh or someone else, what time did the Earnshaw deal give us to realistically put such a plan into effect? Next to none. To pull off a transfer last night would have required us to have in reserve a deal in which absolutely everything was set to go; one which needed only the signatures on the bottom line. Who knows, had Earnshaw gone to Southampton last week, or had Norwich not stalled for a quick whinge about the cost of signing Earnshaw, then we might have been seriously in the hunt for a new striker – but none of that happened and there really is no point complaining about it.

There is a reality here that some fans seem either unwilling or unable to accept. We went into this transfer window in a better situation, certainly, that we did at this time last year, but still in the bottom five and still looking very much a potential candidate for relegation. In terms of cutting deals during the transfer window, that puts us at a big disadvantage from the outset, more so because unlike some of our rivals at the bottom, the one thing we cannot fall back on a ‘sugar daddy’ to bail us out of trouble. There are no dodgy roubles at the Hawthorns and so we are not, and never were going to be, in a position to offset our current league position by paying over the odds for players or sweetening deals with hard cash. Our reality is that we are a club which must live within its means, however frustrating that might be every time January 31st comes around.

It saddens me that the mere fact that we have wound up in the black on our transfer dealings, perhaps unexpectedly so, as all indications up until yesterday suggested that we were resigned to having Earnshaw on the books until then end of season, have spawned nothing but an unfounded suggestion that we are either preparing for life in the Championship next season or that the only winner in all this will be Jeremy Peace’s bank balance.

Why assume that at this stage?

From what I understand of the club’s contractual dealings with players, all but Kanu have deals in which they salaries are directly linked to our league status. If we go down, our wage bill drops automatically to a level that can be easily sustained by the club on revenues from a season in the Championship plus the ‘parachute payment’ we would receive for having been relegated – in Kanu’s case he can simply leave on a free transfer if we go down, giving a massive saving on the wage bill.

Knowing that, does it necessarily follow that we are cutting costs in preparation for relegation, or are we simply balancing the books as we go along? I’d suggest the latter to be the more likely scenario and that allowing Scimeca, Dyer and Moore to move on is mere fiscal prudence.

All told, we are near £2 million to the good at present – money in the bank and yet money we cannot spend on players due to the transfer window system. What happens to that money remains to be seen; in fact, it is not something that will become clear until the end of the season and, most probably, not until after the World Cup is over and transfer dealings start up again in earnest.

At this point in time, the idea that this money may end up bolstering Peace’s end of year dividend from the club is utter nonsense.

The worst case scenario here is that this money stands as insurance against a possible drop in sponsorship revenue – remember our deal with T-Mobile is up from renewal this year – the best is that it forms the starting point for our summer transfer dealings with whatever other money is made available depending on where we finish the season and whether we stay up or not. Looked at in that way and what we hopefully have here is either a £2 million head start on the kitty to strengthen the squad next summer and make a real push for mid table stability in our third season in the top flight, or £2 million with which to find a replacement for Kanu should the worst happen and we are relegated, money we will need if we are to make a serious push for another immediate return to the top flight.

Right now, those are the only reasonable and fair assumptions we can make as fans - and only if these are proven to be untrue by our dealings over the summer are we then justified in levelling such serious criticisms at Jeremy Peace.

To finish up here, I want to pick up a few points which, it seems to me, are being missed in the general bout of ‘Dad’s Army-ism’ that’s broken out of late, turning some fans into facsimiles of either Corporal ‘Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic!’ Jones or Private ‘We’re alllll dooooommmed’ Fraser.

First, the gap between us, in seventeenth place, and Charlton, safely tucked away in mid-table and in eleventh place, is a mere seven points – whatever worries people might have for the rest of the season, it is a fact that one good run of four or five games could lift us clear of danger, much as it did for Blackburn last season.

Second, of the teams in the bottom half of the table, only Fulham and Portsmouth have brought in more players during the window than us. Villa, Boro' and Newcastle have made no signings at all; Everton have lost four players and succeeded only in bringing Alan Stubbs back to the club, Blackburn also traded out four players for one signing; Sinama-Pongolle from Liverpool, who’s hardly set the Premiership alight, as did Charlton, who allowed five players to leave while bringing in Bent from Everton. I wonder how many of their fans are spending today agonising over the question of whether they’re cutting costs in preparation for relegation.

What many of the clubs in the bottom half have in common, is that they’ve all had major injury problems affecting key players, and to some extent, I think that will be key factor come the end of the season in determining at least one of the teams that joins Sunderland in relegation. What it also means is that any one, or more, of those clubs could still be dragged back into the relegation fight, a fight which some, especially the Villa, could be ill-equipped to deal with should they hit injury trouble at key time.

As fans, where we should be looking is upwards, at the teams ahead of us, and trying to lift the team in the knowledge that it really won’t take much to drag those teams into the bottom with us and maybe overtake them. As fans, what we should be looking to do is get behind the club 100% and take some of the pressure off our own players that’s been there of late, safe in the knowledge that if we can drag certain teams into the fight, and I’m particularly thinking of Villa and Newcastle here, then the pressure they’re likely to get from their own fans could be enough to break them.

What’s been wrong of late is that instead of looking upwards, we as fans have been spending too much time looking over our shoulders and worrying about what’s happening at Portsmouth with Redknapp back in charge and money to burn – just remember he had that last season at Southampton, although nowhere near so much, and he didn't turn them around.

If you look at the teams in the bottom half of the table; at the Villa, Blues, Newcastle, Boro' and even Everton, these are all clubs whose fans believe they are ‘too good’ to go down and all clubs which have, in recent years, spent big in the expectation not just of staying up but of getting up an around a finish which would given them European football. Our aim should be, as a club, to be putting the pressure on them, not on our players, Manager or Chairman.

Protests, even peaceful ones, get us nowhere and could easily turn out to be counterproductive in putting the pressure on us and not on others - so why do it?


TPBaggie, 1st February 2006