It may feel a bit grim supporting a team from the Black Country or the West Midlands right now. We have Villa, Blues, Albion and my beloved Wolves propping up the rest of the Premiership and Walsall languishing at the bottom of league.
But unless you’re from WS1, you won’t have to cast your mind too far back to remember a time when only Villa had a secure place in the top league whilst the rest of us either watched our team yo-yo or clung onto the forlorn hope that we would scrape into the Championship play-offs.
So with the season now well into its second half, I asked Baggies, Wolves, Villa and Blues fans what they think they needed to stay up from the January transfer window.
Predictably the answer from all of them was ‘goals’. If we can just get somebody in who can get 8 or 10 goals between now and the end of the season we’ll be safe – came the common clichéd cry.
In Villa’s case they have thrown £24 million at the problem with the over-inflated signing of Darren Bent. Unbelievable Jeff, as Kamara might say.
No disrespect to Bent, who has swapped a challenge for a European place for a relegation scrap and doubled his wages in the process.
And as soon as one player moves for an exorbitant fee, the rest of the market becomes inflated as other players start believing their own hype.
Fair play to Mr Bent, he made an immediate impact to score the goal as Villa somehow beat Man City at home 1-0. But for a few million more Man City signed Edin Džeko, and he looks a far more complete player compared to Bent.
So, Villa will probably dig their selves out of the mire with the signing of Bent, but what about the rest of us?
Most Albion fans I’ve spoken to were fairly relieved that Carew chose the Britannia over the Hawthorns, but their over-reliance on Odemwingie to bag the goals up front on his own has started to show in recent weeks and they need more goals from either a new striker or a change in formation.
And it’s fair to say that the the signing of lofty striker Nikola Žigić hasn’t quite worked out for the Blues. Wolves signed a similar player in Stefan Maierhofer (The Hoff), a couple of seasons ago, who at 6ft 7.5ins is the same height as Žigić and was just as immobile and in the end turned out to be over £2 million wasted.
And Blues obviously know that the lackadaisical Cameron Jerome can’t supply them with the much needed goals, and it’s unlikely that Matt Derbyshire has the skills to pay the bills.
And with just 24 goals from 23 games, Wolves are suffering again from lack of firepower in front of goal, just as they did last season. Mick McCarthy did try and address this in the summer with the acquisition of Steven Fletcher from Burnley, who seemed a tad expensive at £6.5 million, but in hindsight his is probably worth a quarter of a Darren Bent!
Steven has shown glimpses of what he did for Burnley, but he lacks pace and has yet to really get his Wolves career going.
Mick has come out and said that he thinks he has enough to see him to the end of the season, which given that we are joint bottom of the league, is a bold statement indeed. Know doubt his efforts will have been thwarted to bring in fresh blood, as they were with the failed bid (thank goodness) for Steve Sidwell. But surely with a week to go and only the exciting young Adam Hammill brought in so far, Mick shouldn’t give up hope.
West Ham have brought in O’Neil and Demba Ba, making the right positive moves to give their season a welcome boost and I’m worried Wolves are going to be left short come the end of January.
Right, thanks for reading my first in a series of ten blogs on football in the Black Country. I didn’t want to go down the Andy Gray route, but no doubt we will see the sexist Wolves legends back either on our TVs on Channel 5 or turning up on TalkSport who seemingly will employ just about any waif or stray!
I’ll leave you with quite possibly the worst tackle I have ever seen in professional football by a player who makes El Hadji Diouf look a popular bloke, the nutter that is Kevin Muscat.
Wolves missed out on promotion to the Prem in 2002 and I think Muscat had a big say in that. Playing in his 200th game for the club against Grimsby, and with his contract up at the end of the season, he elbowed Michael Boulding in the face.
He was subsequently sent off (his third dismissal whilst at Wolves), we lost the game and he never played for the club again and after dropping out of an automatic promotion slot, we lost to Norwich in the play offs.
Now in the twilight of his career, Kevin Vincent Muscat ply’s his trade for Melbourne Victory over in Australia. Adrian Zahra, the victim of Muscat’s reckless challenge, may now be out of action for as long as 12 months with a knee injury. Muscat will be back across the white line much sooner, alas, though at least he was sent off – and can you believe he tried to defend himself?
See you again next week.
@Wolvesblogger 