Football FanCast columnist Chris Mackin looks at the latest batch of Championship hopeful's hoping to cut their teeth in the Premier League next season and feels for some of them it could well be a painful experience.

If you'll excuse me my terribly immodest name dropping for a moment, Phil Brown is from the same town as me and I was two years behind his son at school. I'm somewhat fond of how utterly underwhelming this particular claim to fame is and was concerned a Hull City promotion may impinge on it to the point it becomes almost impressive and I start regaling strangers with the tale in the same manner I can still be heard boring people about the time I bumped into John Barnes in the Metro Centre branch of Selfridges ("Alright, John?", said I, "Alright", he replied).

I've always felt my personality tedious and non-offensive enough without additional input from Hull City, thank you very much, so I've spent the entire season with fingers crossed, edgily waiting on their inevitable loss of form and anti climatic semi final playoff defeat.

It was a particularly selfish attitude but it has ever been thus for Premiership club supporters discussing the lower league's promotion race. We know little but snippets of information, our judgements are snap ones often based on instincts and pettiness and miss-placed nostalgia. Queens Park Rangers, for example, are fondly remembered as cuddly and lovely and Not Chelsea and, the presence of Billionaire Bond like-villains in their boardroom aside, most will be rooting for their promotion next year. Other teams, like Leicester, we know we're supposed to not like and even if we've forgotten the exact reasons why, if asked to elaborate we'd probably mumble something about their really punchable face, it didn't stop most of us celebrating their relegation the other day as if acclaiming a substantial lottery payout.

This is not Premier League arrogance either; I imagine all clubs in all leagues have their consistencies and their variables- the fixtures they can set their watches by and the more jarring and incongruous ones borne out of another club's meteoric rise or spectacular implosion. Football fans being hopeless creatures of habit this break in equilibrium is bound to be disconcerting; if you need further evidence look at the cruel way Leeds United have been bullied into developing an eating disorder by the bitchy girls in League One this season.

It takes time to adjust, but sometimes you don't want to adjust and Stoke City in the Premiership is already starting to feel like a bad idea. Quality wise they make Derby County look like late 1940s River Plate and if Bolton Wanderers are as cynical, creatively devoid and as painful to watch as Eddie Murphy's ‘Daddy Day Care' then Stoke are the straight to DVD cash in sequel (equally as unwatchable, yet somehow even worse). They are the ultimate in ugly, physical gamesmanship and feel like the very personification of why this football as science nonsense is a fundamentally evil thing; the sheer antithesis of laughter, joy and music and horrid enough to make you wish the boys who developed the game of Cuju in 3rd BC china has said ‘balls to this' and went down the pub instead. When Greece won the European Championship in 2004 with their unashamed brand of non-football they must have an inkling it would eventually result in teams like Stoke and if there was any justice in the world they world they would have long ago been facing a tribunal in Geneva.

We can take solace in the success of West Brom, who whilst not quite the Brazilian 1970 World Cup winning team their manager Tony Mowbray has led us to believe, do at least like to get the ball down and play a little. If one is prepared to look beyond the despicable Kevin Phillips there is actually lots to admire in West Brom beside the relative flair of their football: they are one of the few teams left in the league clinging to an identity that is purely theirs and don't resemble some sort of botched and conceptually flawed mini-me of another club. Unfortunately the wet kitten like shakiness of their defence is going to give them so many problems that realistically their best chance of survival is signing Iron Man and planting him on the edge of their eighteen yard box (actually this would be an excellent idea- what better way to bridge the gap between the top four and the rest of the plebs than giving us all a Superhero each? I'd bagsie Mr. Fantastic now, Kevin, if Liverpool are really after Harper).

The play-offs seem keen to disappoint. Crystal Palace-a charm less vacuum of a football club, all ghastly shirts and Neil Warnock and a stadium situated with the sole intent of confusing away supporters- seem guaranteed to win them, because everybody else in there looks irredeemably hopeless and bad at football; Watford have scraped in despite losing their last 714 home games, Hull are knackered and a promotion chase which presumably started as a bit of a laugh for Bristol City supporters in October has expanded to scarily unmanageable proportions as they contemplate horrible exposure in front of a mocking nation.

Which is nothing on what they would endure should they actually win the buggers. Having them in the Premiership would actually be interesting just to see if the sheer volume of patronising newspaper headlines flung their way (wherein a three nil defeat at Anfield will be "brave", a late equaliser at home to ‘Spurs positively "heroic") is enough to make Ashton Gate itself wearily sink into the ground and ask to be woken up sometime the following August.