"It couldn't be more daunting, " their manager, Steve Bruce, admitted on Friday.

However, the club has come a long way since the Premier League began 15 years ago. "It was a ramshackle old stadium, 6,000 people and a club going nowhere, " said Bruce, who at the time was occupied as captain of Manchester United. "Now stability has come from having only three managers in|14 years."

After relegation two seasons ago, there was talk of changing to a fourth one.

Birmingham had suffered from injuries early on in the campaign, and a 7-0 home defeat by Liverpool in the FA Cup hardly helped morale.

Bruce then came under further pressure in the Championship after winning only four of the first dozen games.

"There were chants of 'you don't know what you're doing', " he recalled. "But I was fortunate to get the chance. I can understand why Neil Warnock decided it wasn't for him. Look at Ipswich, fifth one year then went down and have never recovered."

Returning to the big league is understandably less exciting than making it first time around. As David Gold, the chairman prepared to sell out to the Hong Kong businessman Carson Yeung, put it:

"Last time it was like a fairytale. But five years on you have to say my determination and requirement is just to survive." Bruce has spent modestly on 10 new players, complaining about a lack of native talent. Defenders Liam Ridgewell (from Aston Villa) and Stuart Parnaby (Middlesbrough) are his two English recruits. The Ivory Coast midfielder Olivier Kapo ("He can grace any stage") is presumably the first player in history to leave Juventus for St Andrew's. Ditto Garry O'Connor from Lokomotiv Moscow, to where the Scottish international striker had made the equally unusual move from Hibernian. "I've tried to make sure the people who've come through the door have fire in their belly and the hunger to succeed, " Bruce said. That evidently did not apply to the Tottenham midfielder Hossam Ghaly, who returned to London even before his contract had been signed. DJ Campbell and Stephen Clemence have left for Leicester City, and Niklas Bendtner has returned to Arsenal, a regular source of loanees, of whom Johan Djourou has just become the latest.

"There's always a shock on the opening weekend, " the manager said defiantly of today's game, in which his team will at least not have to face Didier Drogba or John Terry. Home games later this week against Sunderland and West Ham offer a better indication of their prospects of going straight back down again.

And for anyone who has woken up this morning feeling superabundantly optimistic, the odds on three away victories this afternoon:

a minimum of 1,150-1.