There was a time when you could say that any club who appoints Tony Pulis knows what they're getting.Pulis has, thanks to his work at Stoke, Crystal Palace and now West Brom, become a byword for frill-free stability. The football would not be aesthetically pleasing, it would be physical and solid but he would make your previously underperforming team better.
Most of all, he was a guarantee of survival, a surefire way of banking 40 points and ensuring those sweet Premier League pounds kept rolling in. It was a bargain a struggling club had to make: nothing pretty to watch, but consistency and reliability.
That isn't the case at the moment, though. West Brom's owners will be in town this weekend to watch their team face Chelsea, in the middle of the worst run of form since Pulis arrived at the club. The natives aren't so much restless as twitching mad, exasperated that a Premier League side could be playing this badly.
West Brom are outside the relegation zone by a point and haven't won in nine Premier League games. But this is almost beside the point: they have reached this point by playing almost parodically awful football, negative and ugly as sin. It's as if Pulis has read the most reductive account of his style of play and handed it out to his team. The appointment of Gary Megson as assistant manager in the summer seemed less a beefing up of the coaching staff, more a flamboyant middle finger to anyone who dared ask for anything approaching entertainment or distraction.
Everyone understands that a side of West Brom's means must be solid against the big teams. Playing a midfield three of Gareth Barry, Grzegorz Krychowiak and Jake Livermore might be necessary -- sensible, even -- when Manchester City came to visit. But the same trio against Huddersfield, or a Southampton side who at that point had only won twice themselves?
It's not even really about the personnel, more the approach. This is a perfectly decent set of players, probably the best West Brom have had in the Premier League era, but they're not playing like it. Pulis's main managerial selling point is that he makes a team more than the sum of their parts: at the moment he's doing precisely the opposite.
"You have a look at the players I took over and the players we've brought to this football club," he said recently. "Compare them to the players we've got now." But in trying to defend his record he actually highlighted the reason many had come to the end of their patience.
It's as if there is a level of performance that he is capable of inspiring in footballers: let's call it the Pulis Line. If he is presented with a set of players whose ability is below the Pulis Line, with a bit of time, graft and shouting he can bring them up. But when a squad who are used to life above the Pulis Line arrive, he brings them down.
Pulis made the salient if self-preserving point after the recent defeat to Huddersfield that those fans who want his head now have short memories. He arrived at a club in trouble, saved it and brought it to the level they are now at. His unspoken message seemed to be that the fans should be grateful, considering where they were, but he seems unable to take them further than that. It's a bit like nourishing a starving man with porridge and water then acting surprised when he wants steak and wine a year later. Not even steak and wine: you get the sense West Brom fans would be happy with chicken and a can of Coke.
This is perhaps more about a man not accepting his limitations or, at the risk of sounding incredibly patronising, his place in things. He wants to be given the opportunity to take a team on, to help them progress, but he can't. It's like a labourer who builds the church and then wants to paint the fresco on the ceiling.
There is a school of thought, broadly from pundits and ex-players, that Pulis gets results and the West Brom fans should be happy with the manager they have. The problem there is that first it's incredibly depressing to tell a group of supporters not to hope for anything more, to put up with drudgery because the next guy might not be as solid. But it's also not currently true: Albion won their first two games of the season but haven't tasted victory since. Those are the only two games they've won since they achieved the magical 40 points barrier in March.
Ah yes, 40 points. Pulis's USP is stability. He will get you those 40 points and defend them like a hound defending its master. In seven full Premier League seasons his teams have never achieved fewer than 42 points, but also never more than 47. He'll quickly get to the magic mark of safety, but not much further.
But at the moment that's not happening. At the current rate of accumulation they will finish the season on 34 points, and it would take 44 games to reach Pulis's magic 40 points mark: the shrewd among you may have noted that Premier League seasons only last 38 games, so that might be a problem. The trade-off for a lack of aesthetics with Pulis is that you get results, the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. But at the moment there's no sugar and the medicine is snake oil.
Neil Reynolds had been chairman of Shareholders 4 Albion, a supporters group that represents 432 minor shareholders, for 15 years. Until this month, that is. "I'm so fed up with Pulis and his football I've stepped down as chairman," Reynolds told the Express and Star. "I can't stomach it anymore, he has killed my love for the club in particular and football in general."
This is why Pulis' position is being questioned. Not so much the results, or his belligerent, sometimes dismissive attitude to complaints from the terraces, but because he is grinding down West Brom's fans to the point that they don't even want to watch the sport anymore, never mind the club.