[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

In some ways it's almost anticlimactic: a bit like the One Ring just got destroyed and the Dark Lord Sauron defeated, but instead of fading to the end credits we've got to spend the next twenty minutes fartarsing about back in the Shire instead. For most of the season, the playoffs felt like the minimum reward we deserved, but as time wore on they also felt like the maximum we could realistically expect. There are obviously a handful of better teams in the league than us this time round, and we could have just accepted that, taken our 3-0 5th-place happy ending from last week and declared ourselves done for the year, focusing on next season and leaving the teams who actually have a chance of going up here and now to get on with it. Instead, the EFL are going to inconsiderately make us play more football. Honestly, some people.

Southampton is their name, and beating Albion is generally their game. Sadly, LLWLLLLL isn't Wales's new star striker but our record against Saints in the last seven years. They visit the Hawthorns on Sunday having lost three of their last four matches, but the last was a victory at Elland Road against a Leeds side desperate for the win, so the likelihood that they've turned the corner just in time to bat us aside is near absolute. Even if we miraculously get the better of them on home soil, next Friday then takes us down to St Mary's where we've scored just three goals in the last decade (though encouragingly, one of them was this season and the other two came in a rare 2016 win). You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind's blowing, and you don't need Private Frazer to tell you when you're doomed.

So we're underdogs: halflings, if you will. And as Corberan himself knows, with underdog status comes the absence of expectation and the freedom to play without fear. All of the pressure is on Southampton to perform, and as Leeds found out to their cost last week, strange things can happen when you need a win at all costs and the opposition don't. By far the most likely outcome of the next seven days is Albion exiting the Championship playoffs unsuccessfully for the fourth time - the unnecessary final scene in a season which has already ended happily enough for us - but in the meantime, who says we have to stick to the script? The boring, predictable old Shire needs a kick up the jacksie, and we might just be the hobbits to do it.