With an away day at Albion, Aston Villa face perhaps their most balanced game of the opening season. After a season of fairly staid football with some disappointing results, followed by what was ironically the most likely result, even if it was a loss against City.
Now before everyone goes off to listen to the Smiths and get drunk, it isn’t all that bad. Well not in football terms anyway.
We are still fairly high in the league, even if that is down to a fortunate start of the year rather than an exceptional series of results against top teams.
What we need to do is start getting into good form. With Albion and Sunderland the next two games on the Villa agenda, both games should be winnable and, rightly or wrongly, both will be expected to be won by swathes of the Villa fans.
Do they need to be won? I’d stop short of saying “need” but I do think as time progresses, McLeish needs to gain more traction than any other manager due to his history. Is that “right”? Probably not, but it is the way fans will see it.
Appointing McLeish was a risk that, at present, doesn’t seem to be paying off with the fans. It might be paying off for the board, and it might be paying off in terms of wage management but, news just in, the fans aren’t interested about financials.
After season card holders were sent a letter detailing “plans” the club had, the response was as muted as any real football fan could have predicted. The bottom line is whilst the club needs to operate as a business, the fans actually aren’t bothered about whether Randy is making money or losing it.
What fans are bothered about is football. They want to see the game played in a certain way or, failing that at least, they want to see it to be tried to be played in a certain way.
Appointing a guy who has managed teams in a defensive manner, was always going to be a risk, rightly or wrongly, because fans hated the fact that he came from Birmingham City. McLeish certainly hasn’t been helped by the unfortunate timing of having one hand tied behind his back financially by board measures and economic woes.
However, the gamble of taking a manager who seems more suited to austerity has intrinsic rewards as well as risks, but it’s debatable as to whether those risks will pay dividends, or merely create a handy scapegoat if things go awry.
So is it turning out right? We’ll known soon enough but it’s showing the face of a board that has seemingly overlooked fan expectation, whether they are realistic or not, has given us a look at the blackened heart of football as it stands at present.
It’s a heart pumped through via corporate cash. Cash that has become the lifeblood of the game’s existence, and has become the lure that prompted foreign owners to invest in the first place.
Don’t kid yourself and think that most owners are in the game simply to throw money down a pit. The only two owners in this country who are able to do that are Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour.
Everyone else is just making up the numbers whilst scratching their heads and wondering how they can turn a profit.
Not what most of us wanted to hear, but it’s the fact of the game at present. Can Randy keep up with Manchester City’s money? No chance.
Can Randy develop a team that operates on some fair and economical level? Sure. However, that’s not consonant with the expectations laid down by a team that has won the European Cup.
Villa fans, again rightly or wrongly, believe they should be doing better than endlessly treading water whilst the super-rich go and buy success. They said Blackburn bought the title back in the 1994-95 season, but it is a similar story today in 2011. The only difference is the cost, and it’s only going to go up.
So the problem comes now in the form of where do we go next? Attendance figures already detail that where some fans clearly are going next is somewhere other than Villa Park.
Maybe the game is a bloated dead man walking. Maybe money really has killed some of the essence of what football was about. I’d vouch for saying so after talk of a “Super League” breakaway drew a reaction from me of “Let them go if they want.” Apathy really has struck for many a football fan, myself included at times.
Can football recover from the double edged sword of massive investment and expansion, via the greed of a multitude of people? Only time will tell.
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