Birmingham and Rowett braced for make-or-break Championship finale

“If we had three dice to start with, two are down the drain and we’ve got one left – I’ve got to hope we roll a six,” Gary Rowett said this week as his Birmingham side prepare to welcome Norwich on Saturday lunchtime in a game with huge implications for Blues. Anything other than a win plus favourable results elsewhere would likely consign the club to the third tier for the first time since 1995.

After August’s American takeover with Tom Brady in tow and October’s appointment of Wayne Rooney as manager, Birmingham start the final day in the relegation zone, one place from safety. Plans were announced last month to build a new “world-class” stadium but the immediate task is less glamorous. Plymouth, Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn share their relegation anxiety. One of the four will go down.

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Rowett returned for an eight-game spell as interim manager after Tony Mowbray, Rooney’s successor, took medical leave. He is adamant a full and raucous St Andrew’s will be vital to hopes against Norwich, who need a point to end any uncertainty about making the playoffs. Birmingham won their most recent home game 3-0, against the FA Cup semi-finalists Coventry.

“St Andrews makes such a huge difference,” Rowett said. “I think that’s the given for the weekend: the atmosphere is going to be electric, the fans are going to be there spurring the players on. We’ve got to make sure the team that goes out there, feeds off that and does what’s required.”

He acknowledged the discontent among some supporters after last Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Huddersfield, the team below them who are virtually relegated by virtue of their vastly inferior goal difference.

“When you pay your hard-earned money, travel up and down the country like our fans have done for so many years, without seeing a top team finishing at the top end of the division, you can expect they feel like the players haven’t shown that same commitment,” he said. “That’s been the focus of the week: we’ve got to give them something back.”

Rowett is the sixth person to have taken charge of a Birmingham game this season. He had the club challenging for the playoffs in his first spell before he was sacked when seventh in December 2016. He was replaced by Gianfranco Zola, who after two wins in 24 games resigned with the team in a relegation battle. Birmingham made the same mistake this season, sacking John Eustace as they sat in sixth. Rooney lasted 83 days and was sacked after nine defeats in 15 games.

Results improved under the experienced Mowbray, who won three of his six league games before he stepped away. Steve Spooner and Mark Venus have also had interim stints.

The American investment vehicle Knighthead made headlines when it took over in August and brought the NFL legend Brady on board as a minority owner. It appeared to bookend a tumultuous time at the club. They were docked nine points in 2019 and handed a suspended two-point deduction this term because of breaches under previous ownership. Another former owner, Carson Yeung, was convicted of money laundering in 2014.

Neil Cottrell, a member of the Blues Trust who has been watching the club for 50 years, believes the current owners can bring back the success experienced when Trevor Francis was scoring goals in the 1970s and Steve Bruce was in charge in the early 2000s. “The irony is we’ve got what I think are probably the best owners in my lifetime,” he says. “They’re doing great things on the infrastructure side, they’ve probably made a couple mistakes on the playing side. They’ve also had some bad luck. And they’re starting from a really bad base. And that’s why we are where we are.”

Last month Knighthead acquired a 48-acre site in east Birmingham with the intention of creating a “sports quarter” housing a stadium and training facilities for all Birmingham City teams, plus commercial and community facilities. It said it would create 3,000 jobs and make a “positive contribution to the growth and vitality of the city of Birmingham”.

For a city reeling from financial crisis, Cottrell regards the owners as a net positive but fears internationals such as Koji Miyoshi and Paik Seung-ho would not want to play in the third tier and that it will be difficult to compete if they have to “start from scratch”.

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The owner, Tom Wagner, addressing 200 or so fans at last month’s open house Q&A did his best to cultivate a siege mentality with the slogan “BCFC against the world”. “I promise after a loss nobody in this room is more upset than I am,” he said, and he insisted relegation would not prevent the investment needed to achieve the ultimate objectives in his five-year plan of Premier League football and building one of the most valuable women’s teams in the world. “Irrespective of what happens in three days, three months or even three years, the end goal is the same and that is the place where we all want to get to.”

After years of rolling the dice and hoping for a perfect six, Birmingham need one more than ever on Saturday.