Macclesfield FC to host West Brom XI in pre-season friendly
West Brom will send a team to north Cheshire to take on Macclesfield FC in pre-season with the date set for 12 July.
How many of the Baggies’ senior players will make the trip will depend largely on fitness at such an early stage in the 2022/23 preparations with the North West Counties Premier Division champions getting ready for their assault on the eighth tier.
Robbie Savage is a key member of the phoenix club’s backroom staff having helped them recover from the collapse of Macclesfield Town Football Club to keep Moss Rose as an active stadium.
The ex-Premier League player revealed on his personal Twitter account all of Macclesfield’s pre-season fixtures both home and away.
West Brom are one of the highest-placed clubs they will face which is perhaps why it is a “West Bromwich Albion XI” rather than simply West Bromwich Albion.
Huddersfield Town and Blackpool are the other second-division sides on their radar but both of those appear set to send a fairly full-strength team judging off Savage’s tweets.
Dangerous test
Playing against a team so much lower in the football pyramid than yourselves can lead to a very tricky day and Steve Bruce might be wary of who he sends to Moss Rose on 12 July.
A potentially uneven pitch coupled with aggressive, no-nonsense non-league defenders could be a recipe for disaster and lead to more injuries than fitness building.
You would hope the first of those two conundrums won’t be such an issue in the middle of the summer as it could be in the winter once the typical British weather gets a hold of it but it still won’t be the carpet they are used to at The Hawthorns.
Someone like Daryl Dike might be kept back from such a game having been injured almost exclusively since he arrived in the Midlands from Orlando City in January.
Let’s hope we have a packed schedule of games around the country (and maybe even abroad) so when the season starts for real, we are already in top gear.
In other West Brom news, Carlton Palmer has slammed some “crazy business” that Albion look almost certain to do this summer.
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