[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

"Right, who ordered a taxi to Northfield?" Garry Thompson and Clive Whitehead secure a win over Watford, 1st October 1983

You deserve to lose a match but get a point from it, and come away feeling unhappy. You deserve to win a match, get nothing from it, but come away feeling proud. That emotional paradox of football is where Albion seem to be tangled, coming to the end of this season. Teams who are worse off - the ones who aren't getting either the performances or the results - will bash us from pillar to post for moaning about it. Teams who are better off - those who are getting the performances and the results - will smugly look down on us and rejoice that they're not in the same boat. There's nothing complicated about it: anyone with a grain of sense wants to emulate the latter without ending up like the former. But as the Greek banker said to the suspiciously charitable Nigerian lottery winner, if it was that simple, everyone would be doing it.

Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us playing Watford this weekend; a team also nice and safe from relegation, with whom we were kind enough to share a point on our last encounter, having not been overly bothered about getting all three. It'd be nice to think that this time we might really go for it, as - for the most part - we did against Manchester City last weekend. In truth though, it's another dead rubber, and not one that I'm getting worked up about. We're in a slightly better position than twelve months ago, and an infinitely better one than two years ago: the key is to make sure that the progress continues, and that's a job that extends well beyond any remaining Saturday this season.