[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Having got the result we expected - though not the one we quietly hoped for - from the Etihad on Wednesday, the pressure is now on for Albion on Saturday afternoon as we welcome fellow strugglers Southampton to the Hawthorns in a crucial six-pointer. It is, of course a far greater and sadder occasion than any other dogfight scrap, as this will be the first match played at the Hawthorns since the death of Cyrille Regis last month, and for those who were unable to make the funeral this week, it's effectively an opportunity to pay tribute and bid farewell to a man who went a long way to defining West Bromwich Albion in the modern era.

On the pitch, it's absolutely vital that Albion get this right from the word go, because other results have gone badly against us, and we're now in the position of needing a win just to keep us in touch with the pack and avoid getting cut adrift. With three points here, there are other winnable games on the horizon in which we could really scramble up the table, but with a defeat or a draw we'd increasingly be needing some kind of Leicester-like winning streak to dig us out of trouble.

The temptation at these times to stress the emotional and symbolic importance of sending a great and much-loved club hero off with a win is almost impossible to resist, but I'm trying my best to do so. The debacle of Astle Day three years ago showed just how easily it can backfire when you demand that the players heed the occasion above all else. But just as Cyrille's nephew Jason Roberts earned himself a place in Albion history on the first game after Jeff Astle passed away, with his match-winning goal and a t-shirt that honoured the King himself, so there are eleven men in West Bromwich who have the opportunity to do the same this Saturday. There can be no greater tribute than to just go out and play the game, like Cyrille did; and if the ball should hit the back of the net that he found so many times in his life, *then* you can show the world what the man meant to us all.