Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Lancashire Evening Post, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Albion had lost one and drawn seven out of their 12 home league games they had played so far this season, so this also strengthened my pre-match belief a result was possible. Although I wasn't expecting any fireworks on the grand scale of the ones seen during celebrations seeing in the New Year, I ended up travelling home disappointed after watching this 3-1 loss in which such a flat performance also neither sparkled or fizzed like the many bottles of champagne cracked open following the midnight chimes of Big Ben.
Advertisement Advertisement In the opening few minutes, play-off chasing Albion looked nowhere near some of their quality sides of old, which was reflected by the subdued nature of the quiet home crowd. My belief started to grow a bit more as we confidently pinged the ball around in some early passing moves although we really didn't create much in the way of goalscoring opportunities. In my opinion though we began to play too deep repeatedly coming unstuck when trying to play the ball out from the back in triangles around our own goal area.
This seemed to encourage our opponents to press us harder and it was not long before we were largely on the back foot and enduring our usual prickly time at The Hawthorns. As in our last away loss at QPR we again looked.