Albion V Crystal Palace

The problem with getting used to the finer things in life is that if, on occasion, you are deprived of them, it stings all the more. And that’s exactly what happened against Palace for, after an amazing run of seven home wins in eight Premier League games at The Hawthorns, a run where we’ve been scoring goals and creating chances aplenty, this was one of those afternoons where we could have played until Sunday and still not scored.

Not that there was any lack of effort but instead just a day when the spark wasn’t there, when a team that had been regularly reeling off individual performances in the sevens, eights and nines out of ten struggled to get many beyond a six. It happens, these are men not robots, sometimes you have that archetypal “bad day at the office” so beloved of cliché. And this was one of those.

What we also saw though was a significant switch in the attitude of the opposition. Let’s face it, over the last few years, there’s been no real reason for sides to dread coming to God’s country because we simply haven’t won our games here on a regular enough basis. This season though, we have turned that around, and how.

Yet with that comes a change in the mood and approach from our opponents. In the past, most were willing to come here and mix it, looking for the three points and playing accordingly. But now, as we accumulate wins and points and get ourselves ensconced in the top half of the table, managers and coaches are looking at us with a fresh respect and are coming to The Hawthorns happy enough to escape with the point they started with.