We all know the saying “You can’t please all of the people all of the time”, and Aston Villa fans would do well to listen to such sage advice as a potentially unexpected candidate looks to be appointed.
Whilst few Villa fans will be able to say “I don’t know who Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is as a person”, even less will have predicted his choice as a manager. After all, with the choice of Alex McLeish last season somewhat cementing the board’s decision to use Premier League experience as a criterion for selecting a manager, such an attitude invariably led people to think looking at Solskjaer was just a rumour. Still, appointing the Norwegian would be a step away from the lesser known “You can’t please anyone any of the time” as per their appointment of McLeish.
However, times change, and philosophies change, especially when the board’s last pick nearly meant relegation from the Premier League. Villa can’t, however, spend forever glued to choices that don’t work. That Premier League experience logic may well have a coherent argument behind it, but the fact is that the only managers with Premier League experience who want the job of a team finishing 16th are those that have failed previously.
So, in the potential adoption of a new plan, one that involves a significantly longer term view, expectations may change at board level, and so they should change at fan level. Some may suggest this attitude is accepting mediocrity, that it is besmirching the very name of Aston Villa, that it should be shunned stubbornly for fear of insulting the very name of the club.
To those who think that, I’ll say this – take a look around. Check the date on the newspaper that is probably sitting on your coffee table or, in today’s technological era, look at the date on your phone. Does it say 1982? 1994? 1996? No? I didn’t think so.
This is 2012. Villa may well have a history that has success in it, although I will stop short of suggesting it has been laden with it, but times change, and situations change. Things don’t stay the same, they move with the times, and the only people who survive are those who accept change as a constant.
This is why, at times, I often find “transition” as a laughable statement. Graham Hunt, known on site as Superbox, said as much in an article several months ago, that you have to accept that competition is a constantly evolving situation. Transition shouldn’t be an excuse for failure, because every other club is having to transition too.
So I’d shun the transition word. Does that mean we can expect success immediately, preferably tomorrow? Of course not, and fans would do well to realise this sooner rather than later. At the end of the 2010/11 season where Villa finished ninth in the league, I had hoped that being presented with the stark reality of only being saved from relegation in the last two games would have woken people up to the problems we face as a club. Instead, sadly, all it served to do is have people believe that we were good enough for ninth.
Sure, the league table will have recorded that as our final position but, barring two unexpected wins at the end of the season, we could well have finished 15th – a far together less palatable and explainable situation. The fact we then sold two of our best players in that close season may point to the reason why Villa finished 16th, McLeish or not.
Looking at the present, the only way the club can find a route forwards that is optimistic is by taking a gamble. Villa’s other option is a war of attrition with the league by employing another series of indentikit British managers, all of which have done very little in the grand scheme of things. Hardly ambitious is it – the definition of insanity is repeating the same things and expecting different results.
Is that what you want? After all if, as a fan, you speak of the ambition of the club, isn’t it about time that the club tries to deliver something in line with reality?
Reality is, for Villa, about taking on an unproven man and hoping for the best. It may sound like a long shot, a last desperate stab in the dark by a board devoid of ideas, but it isn’t. The fact remains that, after two seasons of decline, this is where Villa are if they want to display ambition – there is no other option available.
As my first sentence stated, you will never please all the people all of the time, but in changing from Alex McLeish to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, I will take pleasing many people at least part of the time as a positive step forward for this football club.
Who knows, we may find ourselves doing well in the future singing “Ole, ole! Ole, ole! Feeling hot, hot, hot!”. Something to look forward to, hey?
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