Just a few short days away, many of our fans were set adrift on a cloud with sweet thoughts of flowing football, free all-you-can-drink happy hours, and optimism. Fast forward just a few days and I was quite surprised to see the reaction of some on social media sites such as Twitter.
Of course, fans on here wouldn’t get as anarchic as some on Twitter seemed to do as strangely some fans considered the loss to Nottingham Forest to be significant and not, in all reality, merely an inconsequential result in a pre-season warm up.
Now some could suggest that the wins that preceded the loss were also of no relevance, and I would agree, which is much the same as our own manager had explicitly stated in one of his very first interviews as manager of the club. After all, winning all the pre-season games, or losing them all means the square root of nothing when the real season starts off.
I should hasten to add at this point that I’m not suggesting we should be making judgements on Paul Lambert’s team after a few games, or even a few months either. Yes, we all hope that the seemingly different attitude of one Scottish manager to another cultivates different results, but Villa are still a work in progress, and are still far from able to call themselves a top six team.
It may sound almost heretical to suggest such a thing but, if we are honest with ourselves, even with the additional signings that we have made so far – and I don’t believe we are finished with signings yet – there are still pieces of the jigsaw to put in place as well as pieces that should be discarded as soon as is realistically feasible.
I’m sure there will be few of us here who would lose sleep if we woke up one morning to the news that Messrs Warnock, Dunne, and Hutton had been sold off, with many of us being gladly happy to get rid of them even if we got no transfer fee back for all three combined. So, to that end, we all know that this isn’t the perfect team – far from it – so we can realise it will take time to fix.
It may well be that players who have performed fantastically well in pre-season only manage mediocrity over the course of the full campaign, in much the same way as players who may have done little or nothing in pre-season could have a top season to remember. The fact remains that, at such an early stage, it would be pointless to get swept away in emotion, whether it is positive or negative, as so much more is yet to come.
For what it’s worth, I think we will see good seasons from our midfield and, if they can work in a cohesive manner in both interplay and form terms, then I have to say that our four in the middle are as good as most of the teams who are competing for seventh place.
The fact that only two players have really been brought in to that midfield – Karim El-Ahmadi and Brett Holman – is both confusing and unremarkable at the same time. On one hand it is strange that just adding two players has had such a dramatic effect but, on the other, we all know football can be a game of tight margins, and margins that we found ourselves on the wrong side of under our former manager.
So whether we choose to focus on the loss at Nottingham Forest, or any one of the wins in the pre-season before that, my attitude is the same – the results count for nothing. I’ll go so far as to say that even if we win our first six games or lose then all, my attitude towards Lambert won’t differ because I don’t feel fans can make an accurate enough analysis of the team in such a short space of time.
That isn’t to say that I can’t say fans wouldn’t be elated/angry if we did win/lose a long opening sequence of games (largely because we all know the effect football can have on our emotions), but rather than the choice of Lambert as manager will only be vindicated or not at the end of the first season at the very least.
At least we can look forward with the belief and hope that Lambert is still in charge come the end of the season, something that will have been totally different to what fans had hoped for under our former manager. Lambert’s Lions might well have lost a game but all is not lost.
After all, in rumours (nothing I can say is concrete from my side), it appears that Nottingham Forest might actually want to buy Alan Hutton off us. If getting rid of Hutton means losing an otherwise irrelevant friendly to Championship opposition, I am sure I won’t be the only one considering such a deal the sale of the century.
*** Additional *** – It isn’t really the end of the world, but you can feel fine by treating yourself to one of REM’s many hits by having a listen to how the end of the world might actually sound.
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