My name is Matthew and I’m an Aston Villa supporter.
Now, I know the above statement is evident given I started this site and have been giving my views on it for close to two years, but being a Villa supporter throughout my whole life – not just the past 22 months – has given me context of what to expect from the club.
What do I mean? As a fan who has been a regular at Villa Park since 1995 – when I was just 16 – I’ve lived through an era where, for the most part, the highs have been outweighed not by lows but by middle of the road, everyday mediocrity. I’d been a visitor before 1995, but it wasn’t till then that football became a weekly matter in terms of attendance.
Sure, Villa have had achievements during the course of my lifetime – the league win when I was two years old and the European Cup win when I was three for example – but the vast majority of the club’s history during my life has been varying shades of the same old, same old.
The Good Old Days, Comparatively Speaking
Going back to when my pilgrimage to Villa Park began, things were in better shape than how they are now. Villa were in the latter stages of Ron Atkinson’s period at the club, and the season was sandwiched in between two league cup wins. Little was I to know or realise that those cup wins – the latter of which was achieved before I became an adult – were to be the last successes our club would have to date.
So, with that in mind, I often find myself perceiving a view that sometimes seems different, or at least more, how shall I say, accepting than many others can feel. In a time where a lot of people are losing their collective minds regarding our situation at the wrong end of the table, I’ve had comments from fans and pundits to suggest that I’m far calmer than perhaps I should be.
To my own mind, I don’t feel that calmness, lauded by some, lambasted by others, is anything special. After all, acceptance of where one is in their life is far from revolutionary, and is no different to the fact that I accept that me – the 33 year old me who is writing this article – is different to the me that started going to Villa Park all those years ago.
With that said, I know the tendency nowadays is to find fault in things. The truth of the matter is that football is far from the only part of life that society can try to look for issues in. However, if there is one thing that the present me has realised that the 16 year old boy that I once was hadn’t grasped, it is that things change.
Experience – Learn From It Or Fail
Life, of course, will always reflect changing times and experiences. Whether we are talking about relationships with partners, family, or friends, the whole of life is in constant flux. One day you can be swanning along without a care in the world, only to have your life changed in a split second, to be left indelibly marked by life’s experiences.
In Villa terms, the last time we had such an out-of-the-blue shock was probably the resignation of Martin O’Neill and, like with many traumatic experiences, some of us are still struggling to come to terms with it.
Whatever your thought process on O’Neill’s departure, whether you felt it had an impact or still does, it is at least identifiable as a milestone in Villa history, as a point in time where the majority of fans would suggest that things started going wrong, and that Villa’s owner was subsequently focused more on financial stability than anything else.
Which, in real terms, is hardly a cardinal sin. After all, when the realities of the club’s finances progressively became public over the course of the years that followed, cutting costs seemed altogether practical, necessary, and justified.
The issue that leaves many of us in disagreement nowadays is just how quickly this financial stability should have been implemented. Just like in wider governmental spending, so austerity and relaxed spending both have their backers. Some see cutbacks as a way forward in the long term, even if it means short term regression. Others think it is possible to cut slowly and have less of an effect.
Of course, in ideal terms, I imagine we’d like to cut everything back and have nothing change but, if we are honest about things, that is rarely a likely outcome. If you end up in a mess, you generally have to pay the consequences of the actions that led you there.
Or, maybe, you don’t. In fact, if we look at the wider economic picture that we as a world are currently enduring, it may well be quite evident that cause and effect isn’t applicable anymore, what with the mounting debt issues of individuals, corporations, and governments. All of these entities expect to be able to dodge the inevitable result of overspending in the past and, in some cases, are continuing to do so.
Cutbacks Or Cutting One’s Own Throat?
Villa, as an entity, have not been able to avoid these financial times. In fact, if we were to compare the club to your common-or-garden business, the cutbacks involved are far from shocking. If you or I had invested, say, £200k in a company only for it to leave us with aging, overpriced machinery that couldn’t be sold, we’d be facing either financial ruin or a hard time ahead.
Thankfully, for Villa, the former is trying to be avoided. The latter, sadly, isn’t as easy to just skip past. Whether fans want to see Lerner as spending a mere fifth of his wealth – whether looking at it as loans or whatever – the man has, at the very least, tried to back the club.
The reality may well be, as it seems to indicate, that Lerner’s investment was poorly spent, that the right guidances were not sought and that, after all the tumult, things could have been done better. However, as stated many times before, hindsight is a great thing.
Now, I know many of us have said things should have been done differently in the past – myself being one of those people – and that a footballing director of sorts should have been kept around when Steve Stride left in 2007, that investments should have been researched better, and that other aspects of the club should have been ran differently, but these things haven’t happened.
The realities, whether we would have been able to make those decisions, at that time, under those circumstances, are slightly harder to ever prove.
Just as we can lambast a player for his errant pass that seems to illustrate a complete lack of footballing intellect, so we should realise that the game looks different at ground level compared to our detached view.
The Pitch Side View
Of course, any person who has played football – whatever the level it is at – will understand that being in the midst of the action adds stresses and restrictions to how the game is perceived. Trying to put a ball on a sixpence from forty yards out is hard enough, let alone when obstructed by massive framed men who are bearing down on you.
Some might suggest that this composure is a basic when it comes to players playing in the Premier League, and that earning big wages should be sufficient of an entry criteria that perfection is expected at every moment, especially when many players can earn more in a week than many hard working people can in a year.
In the abstract, this might make sense, especially when comparing our own incomes with that of a Premier League player. The reality, however, is that players are just being paid market rates for the most part – even “modestly paid” players, in Premier League terms, are on far more than many can even dream of earning.
The summary of all this is that we have to accept – both at a player level and at an owner level – that money is part of the game and that, at present, we are on the wrong side of it in terms of our plans. It isn’t like we have suffered austerity in every waking moment like many smaller clubs have, but it is what we are facing now.
All that we can do now is hope that our staff have it in them to pull things out of the abyss – we’re going to see just how well Villa can manage without the crutch of a rich owner’s investment. For our sake, I hope we survive.
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