The prevailing view around The Hawthorns this morning is that confidence, that vital commodity, essential to any team with aspirations of success, is ebbing away like the evening shadows.

West Bromwich Albion's 3-1 defeat away to Sheffield Wednesday on Tuesday night, coming so soon after the 1-0 defeat away to Stoke City three days before, was tangible evidence of a club in transition and a team lacking direction.

"Confidence is pretty low," Tony Mowbray, the beleaguered Albion manager, said. Surprisingly for this club, there were no efforts to paint this latest defeat in the best possible light.

As Curtis Davies, the Albion captain, said, "we should be winning games at places like Wednesday".

But one look at the Coca-Cola Championship table reveals that Albion are almost as close to the bottom three as they are to the top. Five league defeats in eight matches since Mowbray arrived is more in keeping with a team fighting against relegation than for promotion.

The players are essentially the same but the team that defeated Wolverhampton Wanderers on October 22, when Mowbray was in charge for the first time, has little in common with the team that collapsed at Hillsborough on Tuesday.

A penny for the thoughts of Jeremy Peace, the Albion chairman, who hastened the departure as manager of Bryan Robson on September 18.

A penny for the thoughts of Mowbray, who inherited a team that had scored 14 goals in the four matches after Robson had departed.

"We are hurting," Paul McShane, the Albion defender, said. And so, too, are the supporters. This is not what they had signed up for. When Albion endured relegation yet still managed to improve their squad, the average fan would have been forgiven for thinking that promotion back to the Premiership was likely.

But the Championship, which contains 16 clubs who are all as good as each other, is a gruesome league. You do not so much climb out of it as extricate yourself from its ominous clutches, like Dr van Helsing trying to escape Dracula.

If dispensing with Robson was a mistake, Albion at least had the sense to make, in Mowbray, the right appointment. He should not be judged after eight matches, even if auguries are not looking good.

Mowbray has an encyclopaedic knowledge of famous quotations and will, therefore, be aware of the Biblical line, "to whom much is given, much is expected." (Luke 12: 48).

Mowbray is aware of expectations at Albion: secure promotion, either this season or next. He knows that Albion are less patient than they were during the Gary Megson era.

Robson was dismissed only eight league matches into this season, during which Albion gained 12 points. In Mowbray's eight matches, Albion have gained only seven points. During the four matches in between, when Albion did not have a manager, they gained ten points.

And yet, the players are working harder than ever. So what has gone wrong?

McShane, the most inexperienced of the Albion players, says: "In the first 20 minutes of the last couple of games, teams have killed us. We try to play as much as we can but, sometimes it's hard to do that in this league.

"We are sometimes playing in the wrong areas, then teams are scoring and defending that.

"There's a lack of confidence in the team, too. I think the lads are down but we have to try to scrape a win from somewhere. The win against Burnley was good but we need to back that up. We need back-to-back wins.

"There is a very fierce determination to put things right. If you're not disappointed when you lose as a professional footballer, you might as well not be in the game. This run has got to hurt us all. If it doesn't hurt the lads, then there's something seriously wrong.

"You could go on a little run and be near the top of the table just after Christmas, so we have to get that going. We have four games at home coming up and we need to maintain our good home record."

Albion are at home to Derby County on Saturday. A defeat could see them slip to 15th place. A victory could reignite talk of a promotion battle. It really is that tight. And precarious.

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