AS weekends go it wasn't the busiest for Jeremy Peace.

Drinking cocktails while wearing a kiss-me-quick hat over in Dubai isn't the most conventional way for a football chairman to celebrate his club's promotion on Saturday.

Nor, for that matter, was it conventional to call a press conference the following morning for the local media - while he was still in Dubai. (Just as well it hadn't been a late Saturday night for those of us working on promotion supplements...)

Still, the statement he passed around in his absense was convincing. As were the answers given by his two fellow directors, the two men charged with looking after Albion's nuclear briefcase in the absense of the President.

The statement, or Statement to give it its due importance, was fascinating. A swerve from the norm. No more would be welcoming the likes of a Ryan Donk or, perhaps more crucially, a Borja Valero.

The interesting bits were "to be competitive in the Premier League, we need to pay market-rate wages to the right standard of players on suitable contracts and this will form a major part of our planning...this summer we will build and strengthen our squad and endeavour to keep our core players while improving and upgrading around them, but it is clearly not all about transfer fees."

Yet Peace has missed the reaction to his statement.

Both Jonas Olsson and Roberto Di Matteo have embraced this feeling. Olsson called it a "cynical" but one which belonged in every workplace in the country. He sees no problem with Peace's mantra. He endorsed it.

For instance you can't expect all members of a workforce to earn the same. Furthermore Albion are hardly going to be heading down the route of extremes. You won't, for instance, find one player earning £10k a week while the centre forward at the top earns £60k a week. It won't happen.

Tony Mowbray struggled with this concept. Using his own worst-case scenario he mentioned the examples of Finidi George and Matteo Sereni, whose arrival at Ipswich apparently unsteadied the steady ship. This is why Albion went big on transfer fees, big on untested youngsters, big on quantity, but low on wages under his stewardship. It was a brave act but one which failed Mowbray and started his sad decline.

Di Matteo, meanwhile, is pragmatic enough to appreciate that Peace's model is the way forward. He, too, endorses it. He grew up with it at Chelsea and Lazio.

As he said at Thurday's press conference: "Some will be higher than others and that's normal. You can't expect everyone to be on the same level."

He knows he needs better players in certain areas and, in some cases, more experience.

Wages, invariably, mean better players.

And dare I say it some of Albion's lower-earning players will be grateful if a top-earner scores the 15 goals that keeps the club in the division. It means nobody will have to flex down on wages.

But a word of caution. Albion fans must prepare for a patient time. The arrival of four or five players won't happen this side of the World Cup. Attention will be focused on South Africa, this side of pre-season.

Players will wait until July or August before committing, whether they are Bosmans or otherwise. Some may wait until the last day of the window, just to keep Sky's Andy Burton's phone busy while he, ahem, ignores calls from Arsene Wenger.

And the names Albion may be looking at - we can all chuck in the usual suspects from Portsmouth, James Beattie, etc - will be wanted elsewhere. Sadly, some may be wanted by clubs with more resource and spending power. It could be a summer of frustration, in so many ways. This won't necessarily be Peace's fault, or Dan Ashworth's or Di Matteo's.

The good thing is that, for once, chairman and 'manager' seem to be following the same path. Not veering off in their own respective directions.

Jeremy Peace can relax and enjoy the rest of his holiday. Not least as a blast of volcanic dust means he's probably stuck there for a few more days. It's a hard life being a Premier League football chairman...