Well, what more can be said after this weekend on a positive note? It is one thing for a section of fans to say to another “you expect too much/too little”, but what exactly happens when a manager is essentially telling the team they have no right or, to be more precise, no chance, to win a game?
Nobody amongst Aston Villa’s fans envisaged an obvious victory against Arsenal Mr McLeish. Few even had much issue with the score per se. What people did have an issue with, and what is totally indefensible by any person, is the suggestion that Villa shouldn’t even expect to win at a team like Arsenal.
Words Are Often Spun In Different Directions
Of course, the word “expect” can be spun in a 100 different ways when it comes to our expectation of winning at Arsenal. In a sense, we shouldn’t “expect” to win at Arsenal, much like we shouldn’t “expect” to win against anyone. Expectation, and thus the presupposition that one team will win by virtue of being the better team, has been the undoing of many a club down the years.
So, in order to make things crystal clear, why don’t we go through the quotes made by the manager verbatim. No spin. No bias. Just literally what was said.
“From our point of view, the first two goals were very weak defending” – Agreed. The defending was poor. However, all season we are sitting on the worst record of conceding from set pieces. The defence, vaunted by many who were willing to give Alex McLeish a chance, was the area the Glaswegian had the most experience in. After all, if you play your entire career as a defender, you’d expect to know how to organise a back four. Whoops – there I go with that “expect” word.
“At 2-0 down in the second half, we said if we could get a goal back then we could have made Arsenal nervous and we did have a couple of chances.” – Again, it is hard to argue that scoring goals can make a team more nervous. However, logic does dictate that to score goals you have to get the ball on target and, as backed up by the stats, Villa failed to have a single shot on target. So Alex, these “chances” that you mention weren’t even on target, so how do you expect to worry a team without getting the ball on target, never mind in the net?
“[Speaking re: the game] But we have to be realistic if people thought we would come here and win.” – This is the sentence that a lot of people are picking up on. Is Alex McLeish saying indirectly that having any belief we could win is ridiculous? Or is he talking about that dreaded expectation word? Few expected to win, but even less felt hopeless about the chance of getting something – even in these dark days we like to maintain a sense of hope.
Taking Apart The Words
It’s very easy for me to sit here and dissect three or four sentences of a man who gave them off the cuff after a match. No, we didn’t expect a win Mr McLeish, but we did, and do, expect effort. Wins are far from guaranteed, but effort is a bare necessity.
This is partially the problem with Villa at present – effort is distinctly lacking. Effort, however, is a player based problem. The manager could, and should, look to make the team more motivated to cultivate a winning spirit, but the players don’t seem to be enacting it.
Looking at the facts, it is perhaps understandable to see why the players are, at least partially, lacking confidence. Too many times when Villa have snatched the first goal, the manager has resorted to type – asking the team to shut up shop and take the three points.
A word of advice to you Alex – we are not AC Milan in the 1990s. We are Aston Villa. That’s Aston Villa with our current defence, not the defence of times goneby where it was rock solid. No, it is the defence stripped of both Dunne and Clark – it is a patchwork defence.
Speaking of patchwork, much of the team has that feel about it. With recent statements from Charles N’Zogbia stipulating his supposed lack of agreement with the managerial methods, the young Frenchman was nowhere to be seen for the Arsenal game. The official line – the player is injured and, in the words of the club, had been sent to France for a scan.
Now now Aston Villa. You may believe some of us are idiots, or even expect us to believe all you say, but what part of that chain of events makes sense? Firstly, every time the manager disagrees with a player, the player ends up injured. Are we to believe this is something of an unfortunate coincidence? Or that the manager is slyly sliding tackling any player who dares disagree with him?
Now even if we are to swallow that explanation, and I have to admit it sticks in my throat when I try to, why exactly is the club suggesting that the player needs to have a scan in France? Have all the MRI scanners in Birmingham spontaneously combusted? Has someone stolen every piece of medical scanning equipment in a 300 mile radius?
This is the sort of statement that just invites criticism, and this is ultimately what I think Alex McLeish’s mentality is all about – he’s trying to cultivate the belief that he is a martyr in the face of an impossible job. That Villa are such a broken prospect that winning a game against a team his own former club beat, as managed by him, is such an unrealistic idea that people should be shot for even thinking it was even remotely possible.
I don’t stick all of the blame at Alex McLeish’s feet, but I do think he is making a bad situation worse. Why make comments about not expecting to win? Why tell your team at half time on many occasions to calm down and close up shop when you are 1-0 up? Why tell the team when Darren Bent is playing to focus all supply to him, knowing that a player such as Bent is easily double marked or otherwise closed out of the game?
Such tactics, if one can even call them that, are counter productive. After the positive man-management of Martin O’Neill, such a volte face under McLeish is the difference between night and day, between black and white. O’Neill, for all of his foibles (and there were many), had the team believing in themselves. Alex McLeish, for whatever reason, has a pragmatism that often looks increasingly like negativity.
We can’t rely on the teams below us continuing to be awful. Of those that are below us, only Wolverhampton Wanderers are in the mire, almost everyone else is scrapping their hearts out to get out of the mess. Wigan beat Liverpool. Bolton seem to be renewed by the faith in Fabrice Muamba’s recovery. Blackburn seem to have turned a corner. Only QPR seem worse off since they have made their managerial change, that is apart from the other team that switched managers and plummeted.
All I can say is this Alex – if you want to survive, you have to remember you left Birmingham City last year and moved to Aston Villa. Such an attitude, such a lack of belief, may have been acceptable as a Blues manager, but we expect better and, if you don’t start cultivating something positive by the end of the season, you’re not going to have this man’s support on any level come next season.
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