In recent years, parachute payments have helped ease the agony of relegation even if their bounteousness can lull a club into thinking the cash flow is never ending. The pattern of a first dry run in the Premier League followed by immediate relegation and then promotion has at times resembled a deliberate strategy – the likes of Charlton and West Bromwich Albion have prospered in a way that clubs that perhaps shone too brightly in their first campaign (Ipswich, Hull, Reading) have failed to match. But even before football’s financiers took their inspiration from skydiving, the trend was identifiable. Having…
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Hopeless Football League Teams 3: Birmingham City, 1993-94
The term ‘rollercoaster season’ is over-used – but Birmingham City’s 1993-94 campaign certainly deserved that label. The season started with high hopes, which quickly subsided, only to rise again, then fall once more, then rise a final time, before being dashed at the very death. But if it ultimately ended in disappointment, it was also a season which marked the beginning of a long overdue turnaround in Birmingham’s fortunes. For at the start of the 1990s, the club was at a very low ebb. Since the the mid-70s, a slow and steady malaise had set in at St Andrews, when…
Hopeless Football League Teams 2: Reading, 1997-8
By the time the 1997-8 season came round, two years had elapsed since Reading had lost so gallantly in the play off final against Bolton Wanderers. Like many nearly men, that defeat had been the cue for a gradual exodus of primary assets. Shaka Hislop, Simon Osborn and Scott Taylor were to move on virtually immediately while other mainstays such as Adrian Williams and Lee Nogan found the exit door over the course of the following 24 months. Also missing were the player managers who had stewarded them to the Twin Towers – results had deteriorated under Jimmy Quinn and Mick…
Great Football League Teams 26: Wolverhampton Wanderers, 1982-3
First: a word of qualification. The 1983-4 season that saw Wolverhampton Wanderers promoted back into Division 1 was a shocker. After an encouraging 1-1 draw with a then dominant Liverpool at Molineux in the season opener, the club failed to win until mid November, clocking up an ignominious run of 14 matches without a victory from the start of the season – 16 if you count a double header against Preston in the League Cup. Indeed, if Wolves fans thought it couldn’t get any worse than that, they were deeply mistaken – two successive relegations were to follow, leaving the…
Hopeless Football League Teams 1: West Bromwich Albion, 1990-91
Regular readers will know our Great Teams series, which recently clocked up a quarter-century of posts with this piece on Swansea’s 1978-79 vintage. Here, our Baggies correspondent Frank Heaven takes a slightly different tack, picking at an old wound in the shape of Albion’s Division Three bound plonk from 1990-91. The first in a new “Hopeless” series, we’ll look to follow this up with similar contributions in the very near future. Buzaglo, Bath, and Bobby Gould. Three names that still send a shiver down the spine of West Bromwich Albion fans – two decades after the most traumatic season in…
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