Time to respect EPL's promoted teams
Jamie McDonald/Getty ImagesNorwich and Swansea, which battled each other in October, are showing that the days of one-and-done for promoted sides appear to be over.
It's easy to get swept up in the slipstream of the Premier League's Fab Four or Big Six. They routinely dominate the league, spend the most time on your TV screen, and their players, by virtue of their grandiose wages, egos and incandescent skills, have a love affair with the spotlight. We actually appear to care about Carlito's whereabouts or what basic law of human nature John Terry chose to violate this week.
And yet, to waste all one's time fawning solely upon the top sides is misguided because the teams emerging from the Championship seem more and more Prem-worthy with every passing season. Look no further than this year's crop of Norwich City, Queens Park Rangers and Swansea City. With a combined 37 points through Halloween, this triumvirate had the best mark of promoted sides since the Premier League started. Though there are another 27 games to play and opportunities abound to regress to the Boltonian mean, it's obvious that the Hoops, Canaries and Swans have earned their league mates' attention, if not that of the viewing public.
Part of that is due to context. Before Sheikh Mansour's Mancunian cash-dump, promoted teams were typically viewed as fodder for the nouveau riche. In 2007-08, Derby County famously set an all-time record for EPL futility, managing just one win and eight draws over a 38-game stint to finish with 11 points, an average of 0.29 per game, and besting Sunderland's nightmarish one-and-done mark of 15 points two seasons prior.
Such record-low point hauls hardly served as inspiration for Championship sides looking to stake a comfy spot in England's top tier, but evidence to support the dream of EPL survival is compelling. Since 2001, 17 of the 30 uplifted teams were able to survive their first year amid the big boys, a crucial step that allows teams a summer to celebrate, reload and learn.
Their improvement is also rooted in economic Darwinism. Financial analyst Deloitte & Touche has estimated that the promotion kitty was worth $150 million apiece to Blackpool, Newcastle and West Brom in 2010-11, thanks to their increased shares of TV income, enhanced commercial revenue opportunities and the much-vaunted "parachute" payments (additional cash payments spread over several seasons should teams drop back down after just one year to ease the drop-off in income). These shots of fiscal adrenaline ensure that the Prem rookies are no longer just lower-tier fodder for the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City to bludgeon by five or six goals.
(Liverpool fans might disagree with the fodder remark: They won twice and lost four of their meetings with Blackpool, Newcastle and West Brom last season.)
So how have Norwich, Swansea and QPR managed to set their record pace?
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Ben Queenborough/Icon SMINorwich City manager Paul Lambert has relied on the players who got him to the Premier League.
At Carrow Road, the answer revolves around manager Paul Lambert, the mercurial Scot who won four SPL titles with Celtic and a Champions League medal (the first British player to win the honor) in 1996-97 as a combative component of Borussia Dortmund's midfield. Lambert's approach is simple: Use the players that got you promoted, and trust in them. Where ex-Canaries boss Glenn Roeder and, to a lesser extent, his successor Bryan Gunn faltered was in their reliance on expensive, disinterested players on loan who had no emotional stake in Norwich's success, so much so that the ensuing lack of fight dropped the club to the relative anonymity of England's third tier in 2009-10.
Lambert, after securing back-to-back promotions, scouted and signed the best of the lower leagues and melded them into an effective squad that won at Bolton, earned a 1-1 draw at Anfield, came within eight minutes of a draw at Stamford Bridge and held Manchester United scoreless at Old Trafford for nearly 70 minutes while mustering 14 shots of their own in a valiant 2-0 defeat. Players such as Steve Morison (15 goals for Millwall in 2010-11), ex-Leeds United maestro Bradley Johnson, and 2010-11 League 1 Team of the Year selections Elliott Bennett (Brighton & Hove Albion) and Anthony Pilkington (Huddersfield) have helped to catalyze and foment self-belief. They are young, vital, determined and currently good value for eighth in the Prem.
Swansea, the first Welsh club in the EPL's two-decade history, plays much like Ian Holloway's swashbuckling, rambunctious Blackpool side, unafraid to lose and unwilling to park the bus and pray for points. Instead, Brendan Rodgers keeps his club playing in the style that got it promoted: a dominant possession-based game normally reserved for the league's best sides. After all, it's much harder for the opponent to score if it's forever chasing the ball.
So far this season, only Chelsea (59.64 percent), Arsenal (58.04 percent) and Manchester City (56.95 percent) have enjoyed higher average per-game possession percentages than have the Swans at 56.14 percent, helping them to a comfortable 0-0 draw at Anfield and dominant wins over Bolton (3-1, with nearly 70 percent of the ball) and Stoke City.
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Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty ImagesQPR has enjoyed a good start to the season and currently sits 11th in the EPL table.
As for QPR, it's the most likely of the three to become a permanent Prem fixture. Thanks to the financial muscle of Tony Fernandes, the club's newly minted Malaysian owner, Rangers immediately signed several chip-on-their-shoulder or overlooked Prem players desperate to prove their worth: Joey Barton, so-long-forgotten-that-he's-dusty winger Shaun Wright-Phillips, Anton Ferdinand, ex-Arsenal defender/liability Armand Traore and Aston Villa's Luke Young.
Adding to the stability of a once-drama-attracting club has been the tenure of Neil Warnock, hired in March 2010 for his grace under pressure and to bring a sense of calm to a club that had changed managers at a hyper-Abramovichian rate of 10 times over the previous 2½ years. His sideline savvy and Fernandes' promises of further significant investment have helped Rangers to play worry-free football, as evidenced by their first win over Chelsea in 16 years and a battling 3-2 defeat to all-conquering Manchester City in their first 11 games this season.
Whether the good times for the Prem rookies continue is anyone's guess; after all, it was only three years ago that Hull City won six of its first nine EPL games, beating the likes of Arsenal and Spurs, before ending the season with seven defeats in nine and avoiding the drop by a point. Hull was relegated the following season.
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But with each of this season's debutantes at the EPL ball flirting more with a place in the Europa League than a return ticket to the nPower Championship, fans of Bolton, Wigan and Blackburn might want to plan trips to Leeds and Ipswich instead. The days of one-and-done appear to be well and truly over.
James Tyler is a freelance writer who has worked for ESPN The Magazine. He was the founder and editor of Unprofessional Foul and has written for Run of Play and Time magazine. He can be found on Twitter at @UFJamesT.
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