Hackett’s Hammer: West Brom Should Have Been | First Touch – Oct 29
Good morning. It’s Thursday, October 29, 2026, and the Championship is sorting itself from the pretenders. Yesterday’s headlines spoke volumes: West Brom’s near-miss with destiny under Hackett, and Birmingham City’s calculated gamble on Fujimoto paying dividends—just not at home. In a week where the gap between ambition and execution has never been starker, today’s First Touch cuts through the noise to show you what actually matters.
Hackett’s Hammer: West Brom Should Have Been
Sometimes in football, the fine margins aren’t measured in millimeters or VAR angles—they’re measured in belief, timing, and the weight of a manager’s vision. West Brom under Hackett came agonizingly close to something special, and that near-miss stings precisely because they had every ingredient for a genuine promotion push. The question haunting The Hawthorns this morning isn’t whether they played well enough; it’s whether they’ll ever get another chance to prove what they could’ve been.
Hackett’s tenure represented something increasingly rare in the Championship: a clear tactical identity built on pressing intensity and controlled aggression. The team showed flashes of genuine quality, moments where you could see the framework of something genuinely competitive taking shape. But football doesn’t reward “could’ve beens,” and West Brom’s inability to convert that structure into sustained results has left the fanbase wrestling with what-ifs. The Championship’s unforgiving nature means that windows of opportunity close fast, and whether Albion can find another manager capable of harnessing that potential remains the central riddle facing the club heading into winter.
What makes this particularly sharp is the timing. West Brom had pieces in place. They had a coherent strategy. What they lacked, ultimately, was the ruthlessness to finish the conversation when the moment presented itself—and in the Championship, that conversation rarely gets reopened.
Fujimoto Finding Form at Tokyo Verdy After Birmingham City Loan Exit
There’s a particular sting to loans that don’t work out at home but flourish elsewhere. Kanya Fujimoto’s September move to Tokyo Verdy represents more than just a second chance—it’s a referendum on Birmingham City’s current state and a reminder that sometimes the reset button needs to be geographical. The 27-year-old attacking midfielder arrived at St. Andrew’s with pedigree but found himself swimming against the tide in a squad struggling for cohesion and confidence.
What’s instructive here is less about Fujimoto’s quality—he clearly possesses it, and Tokyo Verdy’s acceptance of his form speaks volumes—and more about Birmingham’s broader dysfunction. The Blues have become a club where talented players arrive with promise only to find themselves caught in quicksand, unable to generate the platform needed to perform. Fujimoto’s loan exit isn’t a failure of the player; it’s symptomatic of a deeper institutional problem at a club that should be competing for automatic promotion but instead finds itself firefighting on multiple fronts. His success in Japan raises uncomfortable questions about whether Birmingham’s issues are systematic rather than circumstantial.
For Fujimoto personally, Tokyo Verdy offers what St. Andrew’s couldn’t: clarity of role, tactical coherence, and a team structure that allows attacking midfielders to flourish rather than merely survive. It’s a pragmatic move that serves everyone involved, but it’s also a quiet indictment of where Birmingham currently stands in the Championship pecking order.