We all love the club. I do, I know you all do, and I’m pretty sure the owner does, but we all have different ways of expressing it.
Some of us want to protest, but some don’t. Some want change, whilst some think perpetual change does more harm than good. Some think Randy Lerner is Satan incarnate looking to punish Aston Villa for some sort of built up karma they must have acquired, whilst others think he is doing his best, even if his best may well not be good enough.
Ok, the last statement was a tad over the top, but you all get the point – I’m not questioning if people love Villa, I know we all do.
What I am asking nowadays though isn’t whether Alex McLeish should or shouldn’t be sacked, nor about getting all of the fans on one side so we can say “Right, that’s it chaps. We’re all against the current situation.” only to find that the result is, well, nothing at all besides a larger group of angry people.
We have all had discussions on how we should change the situation and put forward ideas on everything from tactics, to personnel, to Mittens. Good old Mittens.
We express these feelings because we all love the club, Mittens, and a variety of growlers, but we all have different ways of wanting to get things done.
Some like 4-4-2, some prefer 4-5-1, others prefer other formations.
Some think the players are good enough and that axing the manager will revitalise them, while others think the issues are far deeper than one sacking can make.
The point is that, for the most part, all we are ever going to be able to see is what the club decides to do. I may well think, like many others, that certain players need to be bought and sold, but what I think counts for nothing to the club’s owner. I’m under no illusions there.
After all, the club is a privately owned enterprise. Even as one of the younger people on this site, at 33 I can still remember seeing Villa as a club that I had some ownership of, and I don’t just mean in terms of shares that were bought by my family.
What I mean is that, back in the olden days, there was that sense that this was indeed “our” club and, despite whether you liked or disliked Doug Ellis, we at least felt connected to Villa. Loud mouthed and opinionated Ellis may well have been, and still is to be fair, but at least we knew where things were at.
Nowadays things are different. When Lerner took over as owner, people were happy because he said very little and just gave out money. When you think about it that way, who wouldn’t be happy if someone did that, right?
When the money dried up though, as it invariably does when you aren’t the richest person in this game of “who has the biggest bank balance”, things invariably started to go awry.
That loveable personality that people had projected on to the owner via his work with Acorns, or the restoration of the Holte Pub was soon replaced by something else, something different, something altogether more dark and unsettling.
The fact remains that, in relative terms, dollar billionaire Lerner is a comparative pauper in the Premier League, so competing by just spending more money simply can’t work.
I won’t be the only one to remember chants of “There’s only one Randy Lerner” echoing around Villa Park, as though this was a club where the owner was as well loved, if not more well loved, than the manager or players.
The fact of that matter is that, back then, just like nowadays, fans didn’t really know the man they lauded in chants. All they knew was that he was doing something that was working and, therefore, he was lauded for it.
When time passes and fans realise that reality is a tad more stark than the belief that spending could happen ad infinitum, they still don’t know who Lerner is, but they will change their perceptions.
Randy Lerner, the man himself, has not changed at all. He’s still the same as he ever was – still erudite, still interesting, and still stubborn. The view of the fans towards him though? Totally different nowadays.
The issue here is not that Randy is good or bad, or that he is a positive or negative person to have involved with the club, but rather that everything about him is a projection.
In psychology, projection is, in simple terms, about projecting the beliefs that a person other than yourself is exhibiting traits that are either positive or negative. The reality is that those traits are just your own thoughts and attributes broadcast on to another person.
As I said earlier, the owner has been something of a vacuum in terms of knowledge simply because people didn’t know, and still don’t know much about the man.
People can read articles about the Cleveland Browns and his perceived failings there, and can draw up conclusions on who or what they think Lerner is as a person, and as a chairman of the club.
All of this creates perceptions that generally just back up what the person wanted to think in the first place – you will find the good or bad in anyone if you want to look for it to validate a point.
People can’t, however, know who or what he is from afar. Just like many of us, nay all of us, don’t really know what is going on inside Lerner’s head as the owner of the club, all we can do is second guess.
We can take our own anger towards a person, or people, at the club, and we can use that anger to beat Lerner over the head with. We can postulate, even though we can never definitively know answers, that change could make a difference.
Change may well make a difference but, on the other hand, it may not. Binary logic doesn’t make sense, nor does it work in this instance – merely doing something different does not imply that success will be any more forthcoming.
There is no harm in expressing opinions based on thoughts and beliefs – we all do it on a daily basis – but if we build a reality based on unknown quantities, we are in danger of progressively losing touch with what is actually going on, doomed to forever dwell in a perpetual cycle of anger and demands.
I don’t doubt for a second the depth of love that we all have for the club, and I am in no position to call my view the right one, or anyone else’s the wrong one.
What I do know though, is that we will all continue to operate in our own individual ways simply we don’t know the full picture.
The reason I give Lerner the benefit of the doubt is because I give everyone I meet the benefit of the doubt until they prove my trust is unfounded. Some may call that naive, whilst others say it is honourable – two sides of a perception that I think is intrinsically neither.
I don’t make presuppositions that the next person who I meet may screw me over just because some other person did in the past. That is not fair on anyone – I can only deal in facts.
Which is why, in my opinion, people should give Randy Lerner more credit than some do. Things may appear erratic and unpredictable from our perspective as a fan, but this is simply because we do not know, and may never know, the full story.
Generally people don’t try to deliberately ruin projects they have a vested interest in, if only because they don’t want to cut off their nose to spite their face.
So if you ever wonder if Lerner is planning a Machavellian plan to destroy a club, dismiss it for what it is – an errant thought. Lerner may well be proven to be naive, or a poor owner in visionary terms, but he is not going to ruin his club for the sake of antagonising fans.
There is much anger about many things at the club, and for valid reasons, but when it comes to the owner, we need to understand that there are too many unknowns to fill in gaps with sheer conjecture.
If you do fill in gaps, try to work out why you’re doing it. Is it because Randy Lerner is a truly evil man intent on destroying his own fortune, or because the narrative runs better if it enables us to be angry towards a person rather than the reality?
Which may well be it, if we care to admit it, given that our club just couldn’t compete because it isn’t as rich as Manchester City, nor as large as Manchester United. Sobering and depressing, maybe, but also an admission of our inability to control a situation that affects us emotionally.
It is easy to find scapegoats and vent anger because of individuals who have done below-par jobs, but anger can’t go on forever. Why? It is pretty evident anger isn’t going to do anything, and Lerner will invariably just tuned the anger out if he believes what he is doing is the right thing.
So call for McLeish to be sacked if you want, he may well deserve it considering his results, but don’t expect change because the owner may well be looking at a whole different picture that us mere fans are simply unable to be informed about.
The Author
