Before
I'm sitting on the train up from Marylebone to Birmingham and there's a good smattering of our fans onboard. I haven't managed to get my hands on a ticket for the match yet as I find getting hold of tickets for our away games is becoming increasingly difficult. They go on sale from 10 a.m. when I'm stuck in a classroom while the S.A.F.C. website had no facility for buying tickets on the day they became available for this game so of course by the time I was able to get through all the tickets had been sold. As ever, though, I'm confident of getting in. Like everyone I was less than happy with last week's game when we once more shot ourselves in the foot by a needless red card. I hope Howard Webb's pep-talk had some effect as we can all do without throwing away more games. Turner's back in contention and so Mensah's absence will be partly covered but Da Silva's name seemed to be touted a lot last night, which doesn't quite fill me with the same confidence. Last time we played at the Hawthorns we were well and truly taken to the cleaners but I can't see that happening again though that 6-0 defeat last week will have them trying extra hard to redeem themselves. I think we'll get a draw and we really need to as we've got a very tough series of games coming up.

After
I'm sitting in the Yard of Ale in central Birmingham licking my wounds with the help of a cool pint. I managed to get into the game by the simple expedient of going to the ticket office and buying a ticket for one of the West Brom areas. This was before a delicious bag of chips at the Chick King and a drink or two in the friendly atmosphere of the Royal Oak, where West Brom and Sunderland fans drank cheek by jowl in perfect harmony. Anyway, we didn't deserve to get much from today's match as the Baggies just looked to be more up for it and I don't think we had a shot on target for at least an hour. In the first fifteen minutes we were lucky not to be two down after our creaky defence allowed them to burst through and shoot narrowly wide twice. Da Silva in particular was guilty of poor defensive work but he got stuck in and improved as time went on. Mignolet too wasn't exactly instilling much confidence as he flapped at a corner here and failed to smother a fairly routine cross there. He too improved a lot and made a couple of very good saves in the second half. I was impressed with Bramble and Onuaha, particularly the latter, as they defended well and initiated some meaningful attacks. Riveros displayed a lot of good touches and around the hour-mark he made a crucial tackle on the edge of our box when it looked like we would concede. We never won much in the air all day as West Brom had some very big guys, notably Olsson, and won most long high balls. Steed did win a header or too and he played a blinder till he was replaced by Zenden with twenty-five minutes to go. Welbeck came on at the same time and he looked like he was happy to get the ball and run at the heart of the Baggies' defence, something his team-mates for all their neat passes down the flanks seemed reluctant to do. We perked up a lot for ten minutes or so after that twin substitution and I really fancied us to steal a winner so it was extremely sickening to see us go 1-0 down with about ten minutes left. They broke down our left and new boy Peter Odemwingie, who'd got a great reception before he'd kicked a ball, slotted it in. There were four minutes of stoppage-time and we went for it but couldn't get that equalizer. We really needed to get at least a point and will need to have a lot more bite in the final third if we're going to get anything out of Man City next week. Bring on Colchester. Let's hope we can have some useful target practice against them but I'm not so sure. One point of trivia; many former West Brom players have a gate at the Hawthorns named after them but Jeff Astle has gone one further and has a tram bearing his name. Anyway, more lager!

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