With England playing Italy on Sunday after (somehow) topping their group ahead of France and the Ukraine, fans will no doubt be glad that the nation have avoided Spain, for now anyway. The reward for France’s purportedly “better” football? Less points than England and a potential early exit to the Spanish.
England’s team has been underhyped, something that actually seems to have corresponded with a freedom for the manager to get on with his job in the face of otherwise unfounded expectations. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Of course, from what we all know and feel at present, it seems like Paul Lambert will be given the patience and support that our own club needs to flourish. Roy Hodgson’s England will be a far better long term prospect if the nation’s fans act in the same manner too.
I understand how the media are, and how the fans and the media sometimes cultivate this vicious circle of expectation and disappointment, as though pride should be the prime reason for all the anger that we’ve seen in the past.
As I wrote for the Express & Star a long while back, England and Aston Villa are the subject of many parallels if fans look closer from wild expectations based on one night of glory, to the sine wave like trajectory on which emotions rise and fall as the respective managers fail or succeed in whichever limited ways they do.
So what lessons can we learn from England? Perhaps one would be that football doesn’t have to be interesting to be practical. For a long while, it has seemed like the focus of some fans has been entertainment first rather than practicalities.
Now whilst I enjoy watching pretty football as much as the next student of the art, functional football is what wins clubs matches, awards, and trophies.
What some fail to comprehend is whilst the very best teams in the world can both win as well as look good whilst doing it, having the latter without the former is ultimately pointless – top teams have both, not just stylish passing. If style won titles all the time, Arsene Wenger would have more trophies than Sir Alex Ferguson.
Understanding the necessities of how to play to win is why I have been reticent to pull out the knives for any manager, especially not in the early stages as some media pundits have with Hodgson. This supposed self-belief that any team, Villa, England, or anyone else, are entitled to entertainment and style as a paying customer is, to be quite frank, utterly crazy.
Yes, I understand as a paying customer of our club for many years that enjoyment is important, especially when it costs £600 or so to see your team play at home for a season, but sometimes football isn’t art, sometimes it requires the functional attitude of an engineer than an artist. After all, I imagine few people would ask an artist to build them foundations of any project ahead of someone who construct a solid structure.
Perhaps this is the modern way though, what with attitudes seemingly more focused on the acquisition of pleasurable and expensive things than on the practicalities of doing what is best for the long term.
One only need look at the debt crises unfolding across many parts of the globe to realise that wild short term expectations invariably bring long term issues, and ones that can bankrupt societies.
As we all know, football as a sport has been something of an anomaly in a world of austerity measures with players earning more now than any time in the past. I don’t begrudge clubs or players the money so long as teams can afford it, my only issue comes from those teams that can’t.
Which is why it was so important for us to change things and look at the long term with our appointment. Just as England’s start under Roy Hodgson has been functional rather than spectacular, so may the start of the Lambert era follow the same principle. What fans would do well to realise is that moving forwards, even without the bows and whistles seen on fancy world class teams, is a solid target, regardless of how it is done.
Sometimes progress happens with less than pretty results, and anyone with any memories of the Martin O’Neill era will be well aware that Villa’s football was less than mercurial, yet such a plodding, predictable, counter-attacking team took sixth and, if I were to imagine the fans reactions, I would suggest they would take that again.
At least until the club got to such a stage, as they did under O’Neill, before expectations seemed to ramp up again to suggest we should have been challenging for the Champions League for the virtue of finishing sixth repeatedly. Little were many to know, however, that the foundations of such successes were balanced on such precarious footings.
So, in short, we need to keep calm, both as England fans and as Villa fans. If England progress to the semi-finals on Sunday, remain calm. It may not happen anyway, but the last thing this team needs is the heavy weight of expectation hanging over it like the proverbial sword of Damocles.
If, and this is a big if, England can succeed in this summer’s tournament, lessons must be learned from the lack of expectation, and not to fuel a belief that the country is unbeatable. For Aston Villa, adopting a similar stance should Lambert bring short term success would also be a positive.
The future can well be bright, but only when it is seen in realistic terms. Without such realism, progress will never continue regardless of the personnel in charge.
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