Albion fan in peace (I hope that's ok), I just wanted to offer a slightly different perspective on Val from a lot of the noise you'll hear on social media. Val came into our club at a time where we'd just been relegated from the Premier League where there was an expectation that we'd bounce straight back. The owners had taken 5 milllion pounds worth of funds out of the club, they had replaced the very popular Slaven Bilic with Sam Allardyce, and were looking to sell Matheus Pereira, who is undoubtedly the best player we've had for at least 10 years. It was pretty clear that they didn't care, and were starting to make poor decisions. When Val came in, while our fans weren't against it initially, they were hypersensitive to anything going wrong and looking for another stick to beat the owners with. That summer Pereira was sold for a fee perceived to be way less than his value and he was replaced by Jordan Hugill on loan (who both isn't fit to tie Pereira's boots, but plays up front), which was a last minute DOF panic to get a striker in. Despite the squad weakening his start to the season was strong. The first few games was non-stop, high paced football that was getting results. In some ways he became a victim of his own success because those performances weren't sustainable, and when they dropped off the fans turned, but the performances were never as bad as our fans would make you believe. Reading some of the comments online it's as if Val played defensive football, or hoofball, that's nonsense. We didn't have a Pereira in our team so had to try and find other ways to unlock defences which was sometimes more direct, but it was never defensive. Fans just couldn't wait to turn on the manager because of the vitriol to the owners. The biggest illustration of this was a 0-0 draw against Derby at home. At this point we were undefeated, top of the league, the second highest scorers in the league, we had 64% possession, 25 shots, 9 on target and the fans booed the team off at the end. Cries were "he's too negative" when we absolutely battered them from start to finish, we just couldn't score because we were trying to get 30 goals a season out of Jordan Hugill and Callum Robinson. It's funny how a narrative can spread online. As the season progressed, results got worse. Val works the players very hard by all accounts, and our players got tired of it. When Val was sacked, our fans were happy and the rhetoric was "if we get anyone half-competent in, we'll go up". In reality we were one of the worst Premier League teams of all time the season before, we limped to promotion 2 years prior having won something like 2 of our last 9 games, and that was with one player that was a million miles beyond the quality of the rest of the team - and we'd sold him. Val left us 5th in the league, Bruce came in and took us to 10th that season, and then 24th the next season before getting sacked. He signed Mowatt on a free, Molumby for less than 1 million, which is our current CM partnership. I think long term he needs to have players that fit his system, but I think if you're looking for someone to give you a boost until the end of the season then this is a good appointment.