[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Cyrille Regis takes the match ball with a hat-trick, Albion vs Swansea, 5th September 1981

On the list of Things Every Albion Fan Could See Coming A Mile Off, there's no doubt that Swansea earning themselves a morale-boosting win while Albion slid to a heroic, exhausting defeat right before our head-to-head encounter was always high up the list. We now go into this Wednesday night fixture a full eight points and ten places above the Welsh side, and you could be forgiven for fearing that the team who are fighting for survival, who have a fresh boost of confidence, who've had an extra day's rest and who have a nasty habit of always getting results against Albion, are not suddenly going to roll over for the team who've reached the halfway mark a few weeks early and have one eye on the Christmas pudding trolley.

It doesn't help that there will have to be a shuffling of personnel to work around the suspension of Craig Dawson; we'll most likely see Nyom switch over to the right and Brunt drop back into defence on the left, unless Galloway is preferred. This will hopefully also free up space for the long-awaited return of Nacer Chadli in midfield, and if he comes back firing on all cylinders then we may yet have a good game to look forward to.

Three points from this one aren't imperative, but given the look of our remaining fixtures in 2016, it really wouldn't hurt to get that win and keep the pressure off for a good few weeks to come. There's a good Albion team in the making here, but sooner or later they need to shake off the ingrained habit of botching matches against struggling teams, and to begin on Wednesday would be a fine resolution for the new year to come.