Analysis - A fitting end to a season of failure for West Brom

In some ways it’s a shame we won’t get to see how this fledgling manager reacts to this, how he bounces back from the first defeat of his career.

Because that’s it now, the season is over, and Albion have gone down bottom of the table.

This performance was a fitting tribute to the season just gone, a damp squib to bookend a dreadful campaign.

Albion struggled to create anything of note during the 90 minutes, at times the men in green looked alien to each other, but they did manage to cling on for the majority of it.

They have battled hard in recent weeks, but after a flat first half, Crystal Palace ramped up the pressure and the Baggies couldn’t deal with it.

The hosts missed chance after chance before finally breaking the deadlock, and after that, there was only ever going to be one winner.

Palace outclassed Albion for most of the game. James Tomkins and Mamadou Sakho were unfazed at the back, and they flooded forward with pace and purpose.

It was a love-in for Roy Hodgson, who has guided Palace to 11th place, despite giving the rest of the league a seven-game head start.

Albion fans will look on in envy at their hosts and wonder whether it could have been them celebrating a remarkable season had the club sacked Tony Pulis a tiny bit earlier and persuaded Roy to return to the Black Country instead of Croydon.

But just like Moore says, there’s no point crying over spilled milk now.

This season is over, and thoughts must now immediately turn to the rebuild, the summer, and what lies ahead.

Moore is still a strong candidate for the full-time job and will learn his fate later this week.

This defeat may make it slightly easier for the club to turn to someone else, if they are that way inclined. It would have been nearly impossible to ignore an unbeaten caretaker.

The 44-year-old continues to play a straight bat to questions over the job, and sensibly so.

That will allow him to continue coaching at the club if he is not the chosen one.

But whether there is any deeper meaning behind his statement that ‘certainly, in the confines of this club is the right ingredients to move forward’, only he knows.

The truth is that he is probably just doing what he has done for six weeks, sharing the praise around to the staff members of the club.

Sunday’s result may not have been the right one, but the club is still in a better place than it was just over a month ago.

Going down is not the end of the world, the Albion will still exist in the Championship. To most fans, the division is irrelevant.

What’s more important is feeling connected to your club, and enjoying the act of supporting it.

Eight years in the Premier League is certainly something to be proud of, but by the end, it did grow increasingly tiresome.

There’s no fun feeling like fixture fodder for a top six with unmatchable riches and scrapping it out with the rest for the lucrative prize of eighth place.

Next season will be a novelty, and for that reason alone, it’ll likely be enjoyable. Who knows, the team might actually win a few games.

But that’s exactly why this summer is so important. This is not a rebuild one year in the making, it’s a rebuild five years in the making. It has to be done right.