Ahead of the West Ham United game, I had a feeling it would turn out one of two ways – either it would be a game where everyone went for it, or it would be a boring affair with the away team sitting back.
I should really have listened to what seemed the likeliest option – the latter one – and expected nothing more. Instead, I made that foolish choice of believing in Aston Villa.
That choice, looking back, was structured more out of hope than expectation if I’m candid, as when Nathan Baker and Ciaran Clark are the central defensive partnership, we are likely to leak goals.
In that sense, the absence of Ron Vlaar has been a real issue that Villa have struggled to deal with. Last season, many made the judgement that Villa were a one man team, with Christian Benteke being the man lauded as the only one who could save the team from danger. This year, the one man making the difference is Villa’s Dutch skipper.
Such a situation saddens me greatly. Whilst I don’t have any kind of delusion of grandeur when it comes to Villa, I’d like to think that a club who are likely to turn over £140-150m this year didn’t have to rely on one, injury prone player.
Perhaps I am being a little too harsh, and I don’t want to give the impression that Villa lack any quality. However, I do need to illustrate the fact that Villa are headless and anaemic when Vlaar fails to play.
All of this leads me to a fairly obvious question given the frailties of the team – “Could Paul Lambert have done better since he has been at the club?”.
For some, the view is most certainly yes. For others, no. If we are to look at one issue that splits the fans the most, it is that belief (or a lack thereof) in the manager.
Much has been discussed about the lack of money that Lambert has had to spend or, to be more particular, the lack of money when viewed in the context of the rebuilding work that needed to be done.
Should Lambert get the same £20m or so in the summer – assuming the likely outcome of him still being manager at that time – there is a strong argument that it could be split two or three ways, focussing on quality over quantity.
Which, if wer’re honest, is the opposite of what we have seen since Lambert has been at the club, with the Scot bringing in large numbers of players into the squad.
In fairness, I probably wouldn’t have done anything different – the gaps were there and they needed plugging – but the budget afforded has allowed for little more than a team that is mostly from the Championship level or below.
Given such a strategy – buying lesser players – and the enforced austerity, Randy Lerner has been taking a massive gamble on the club. Yes, these choices are possibly the only options that the club have – the wage bill did have to be cut, and few managers would want the job under such austere measures – but fails to illustrate the full picture.
That full picture would, if we zoom out from the view we normally take, show that Villa’s problems are all self-inflicted. Whoever one wants to blame for the expenditure and previously rising wage bill, the fact is that the board – every one of them still at the club – signed these deals off.
Maybe they were overly naive in agreeing to the terms that their manager suggested. Maybe they really should have intervened sooner in order to prevent what we’re seeing now. Maybe, just maybe, doing some of those things would have changed Villa into something more than what they are – a team barely surviving and lacking in entertainment.
The brutal reality for Villa is they are locked into their path because of those past mistakes – issues that could have been avoided if only naive behaviour wasn’t so prevalent.
Not only that, but why in the world would an owner who lacked the nous to define a football strategy then go on to remove personnel like Steve Stride? Was it a case of the new owner feeling threatened?
Whatever those changes were initiated by, the fact remains that Villa still – to this day – lack any kind of top level direction. Giving Lambert free reign is, in a sense, logical, though there still is the fear that, if Lambert leaves or is sacked, few of us have any faith at all that the board can make the right decision.
Which, for me, is probably the biggest issue for the club at present. We have often been told to be wary of being the play thing of a super-rich oil baron given their propensity to get bored with their toys.
But, by the same token, we should have been as wary of a man coming in with no football knowledge. Now, as we are eight years from that time when Lerner first rolled into Villa Park, we’ve gone backwards at board level.
Such a situation is the reason why things are bad. However, as we know in the game, it is rarely the board who fall on their sword in time of trouble. We’ve seen managers thrown under the bus for a number of reasons, though nobody – yet – has taken any kind of attempt to apologise for the mess created by the board.
Villa may well survive, and may build if things turn around but it would be more to do with dumb luck than any kind of strategy. The big question the board must try to answer in their own minds is the following:
How far forward have you really taken the club since Doug Ellis left?
The answer, sadly, would be nowhere near as far as many expected.
The Author
