00:00Birmingham World reporter Charlie Haffenden is adamant that West Bromwich Albion should have made the Championship playoffs last season,
00:07but instead slipped down the table after Carlos Corboran departed as manager.
00:12Absolutely. I think the fact it was on Christmas Eve as well, it's not quite the Christmas present you want to wake up to, is it, on Christmas Day?
00:20You can understand why he left going to his boyhood club, Valencia, who were in a relegation scrap in La Liga.
00:25He's done an incredible job since. He's got them very close to European football.
00:30In La Liga, which is incredible considering where they were. Fair play to him.
00:33But it just emphasises how good of a manager he was and how much of a miss he is for West Bromwich Albion.
00:38I know at times the football wasn't pretty, but grinding out one nils and two ones here and there were enough to claim enough points,
00:45especially in the first kind of 10, 15 games of the season.
00:48At that point, West Brom were right up there, potentially even outsiders for automatic promotion.
00:54But obviously things fell away. So many draws. I mean, it was getting ridiculous, wasn't it?
00:58At one point, hardly any goals at the Hawthorns whatsoever. It was getting really boring.
01:03And maybe there wasn't much of an upset when Corbran left as a result.
01:07But you can see that it's not just Corbran while they were drawing so many games, it's the squad in general.
01:11And Haffenden also believes that there was more to Birmingham City than the big money transfers that they brought in before last season,
01:20which saw them promoted with a record points total.
01:22Oh, absolutely. 111 points is a world record for a 46-game season, a professional league anyway.
01:30That's incredible in itself. And I can't ever see that record being beaten, to be honest with you.
01:35I know they spent a ridiculous amount of money in the summer transfer window, utterly unprecedented,
01:40splashing ÂŁ13 million on one player.
01:42And Jay Stansfield was about four or five times the amount of the previous League One record transfer fee.
01:47That's outrageous, I know. But they still had so many new players.
01:51I think it was 20 new signings in total that had to gel. So many departures.
01:55The football club, the morale around it was just on the floor.
01:58So it's a lot of challenges. And Chris Davies had never managed properly before.
02:02He'd been an assistant, the likes of Tottenham and Celtic, and he'd been in the Celtic setup as well.
02:08Leicester, and he'd had experience winning an FA Cup in that run with Leicester.
