[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Courtesy of the stupid bloody World Cup being held in stupid bloody Qatar in the stupid bloody winter, this year we have the ineffable delight of seeing the league season commencing, for the first time ever, in stupid bloody July. For Albion this necessitates a journey up to Teeside to face Middlesbrough, who finished three points and places above Albion last season and narrowly missed the playoffs, in an early evening kick-off on Saturday. Unless FIFA decide it should be brought forward to the small hours of Friday morning, hosted in Western Sahara and played in a stadium made from human skulls.

It won't be an enormously different Baggies side lining up this weekend, but the summer additions of John Swift and Jed Wallace promise some much-needed creativity in attack, while the welcome re-addition of Okay Yokuslu - a staggeringly good signing for this division - adds steel to the team's spine for an encounter which will tell us a lot about our chances for the coming campaign. Promisingly, Middlesbrough have won just three of their opening games since the Millennium, the most recent of the trio in 2014; while Albion's own record isn't anything to shout about, Steve Bruce is a man who likes a winning start, and has achieved one in five of his last six seasons in this division. But more ominously, we've won just one of our last eight league matches against Boro; that victory, in October 2019, came at the Riverside en route to our last promotion. Crack this tough nut and it may augur well for the months to come.

It's the first time in a century that Albion have opened the season against the Teessiders, with the last curtain-raiser between the sides in August 1921 finishing in a goalless draw. That would be far from the worst outcome on Saturday, but we'd all like to see a bit of excitement to kick off the footballing year, so if we can score a goal or two and come away with at least a point, then it's mission accomplished.