SYNOPSIS

West Bromwich Albion are one of the truly great clubs in British football - five times winners of the FA Cup, founder-members of the Football League in 1888 and League Champions in 1920. They have completed sixty-one years in the First Division, a total surpassed by only four other clubs. As with all sporting institutions, the Albion's formidable reputation has been built by a succession of top-class players with many Internationals having donned the famous blue and white stripes, stars from all the Home Countries and Eire.

Some of the outstanding players to have appeared in the Albion team spring immediately to mind from the annals of soccer history - Bill Bassett, winger supreme in the 1880s, held by many to be England's best ever; Jesse Pennington, with Blackburn's Bob Crompton the England team's safest full-back pairing, at the turn of the century; in the thirties, W G Richardson, ice-cool goal-scorer, was the equal of his more famous contemporary, Dixie Dean, in snapping up the half chance. More recently, many of today's top managers started their illustrious careers in the great sides of the fifties; Don Howe, Ronnie Allen and Bobby Robson.

Even more important to a club than a glorious past - which the Albion certainly has had - is the likelihood of a glorious future. Who can deny that Albion now have the makings of a world-beating side? Currently the most attractive side in the Football League, with a blend of the experience of old campaigners John Wile and Tony Brown and the youthful exuberance of rising stars Cyrille Regis, Peter Barnes and Derek Statham, Albion look certain to add to their already impressive list of trophies.

West Bromwich Albion: The First Hundred Years unfolds the story, decade by decade, of how the Albion rose from a local works side to an internationally feted outfit respected in all the countries of the world they have played in, from Brazil to Canada, China to the USSR.