It's been a good week for the Albion. Micky Adams was perhaps the best manager we've ever had and I still think it's been a good week. No contradiction.

For all the predictable media references to Shocked Albion Fans and Sledgehammer Blows, most supporters knew it was coming. It wasn't the slightest bit clever of me to suggest in an early season column that Micky would be in the East Midlands before Christmas.

When he strode into Hove Town Hall on that wonderful evening in 1999 he brought with him a bagful of skills and an unquenchable personal ambition. Those two qualities were a job lot. We couldn't have one without the other.

We were happy with the deal then and it's a bit late for us to start complaining now. It was always obvious that if Micky could prove his skills he'd be off. The greater the proof he provided, the higher his exit trajectory would be. Now he's gone to the Premiership. Enough said. Two years before he arrived, members of the present regime took their first look inside the Goldstone Ground offices.

They found a desolate wasteland, even worse than anyone expected. Not even the fax machine was working. The team was on life support, the money had gone and the grim reaper was in the Old Shoreham Road, revving up a demolition machine. Standing amid the ruins the new board had a simple enough ambition. To climb to the peaks again. I know little of rock climbing but I do know that no one ever got to the top of a mountain by just walking up it. It has to be done in stages, one at a time. Micky's accomplishment has been to help take the club a long way from base camp. A few dozen months after those dire last days in Hove we are halfway up the professional football pyramid, as close to Leeds United as we are to Torquay United. The view's getting nicer by the minute.

As the slog up the foothills proceeded, the manager the board appointed in 1999 and backed ever since made his intentions clear enough. Genuinely grateful to the Albion for what it had done for him, he was becoming frustrated. He had the faint air of a locum on a temporary assignment. Cage doors were being rattled from the inside. Hints at spats were emerging. The very last words of his very last programme notes were a dark reference to "difficult circumstances".

Micky, I suspect, is a founder member of the awkward squad. It was clear from a distance that he could be prickly and I can't off-hand think of any other manager who would start a season by telling supporters he was disappointed not to have been offered a job with a more important club. Perhaps for everyone's sake it was time for a parting of the ways.

So where does it leave us? With a good division two team for a start, which will still be a good division two team if Bobby Zamora and Danny Cullip depart, which they probably will. It also leaves us with the worst part of the climb behind us. When Micky arrived he may have thought that we would be in a permanent home inside three years. That was never going to happen but now, two years down the line, it is becoming feasible. Apart from the fact that he will have a difficult act to follow, the new manager will arrive at a good time. Results may dip, a player or two may leave, but at least the supporters will know where they are. We've been concerned about Micky's departure for a year. We can stop being fearful now. The next part of our odyssey is at hand.

Anna Swallow