After yet another home loss, albeit against the league leaders, Paul Faulkner gave the manager the seemingly dreaded vote of confidence. In reality, it was more of a state of the club address than anything. In Randy Lerner’s mind, the balance sheet has been cleaned up, the club has a long-term vision which needs stability and the manager needs more time. More critically he cited the club’s position in the table and six clean sheets as signs of progress.

Given how tight things are in the bottom half of the table, citing our 11th position as progress is a bit misleading or even disingenuous. If the club can’t snap out of this poor run of form, soon they will be in another relegation battle – we aren’t safe by any stretch of the imagination. As the memories of last spring fade and the players struggle with things as basic as a first touch or stringing two passes together, it’s hard to fault anybody for at least thinking that a relegation battle is a likely possibility.

Before the season, if we were to look beyond points and league position, we would’ve looked for continued development from the players who rallied to keep us up last year, and solid contributions from the newcomers. When most of the young players the club are trying to build around have clearly regressed such as Andreas Weimann, Matt Lowton, Ashley Westwood, Yacouba Sylla and Christian Benteke it’s hard to view this season as a progression over the last. A

mong the newcomers Jores Okore and even Libor Kozak looked like contributors before suffering major injuries, Antonia Luna and Leandro Bacuna have been up and down, but the rest have done nothing. If these guys are going to help the club push, on we haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.

I’m not going to say the clean sheets are the direct result of hunkering down but it has also neutered Villa’s attack, and this club’s inability to breakdown any opponent more than mutes any satisfaction I can take from the solidity at the back. Ciaran Clark and Ron Vlaar have been much better than last year defensively, but I still wish Clark went back to the ball-playing defender he used to be instead of reminding all of us of James Collins’ hoofs up the pitch.

This is a young team and most of its problems are between the ears. We would, of course, feel better if the club would address its obvious holes in the team. Paul Faulkner mentioned the seven players signed in the summer. If, in fact, almost all of the transfer budget was used in the summer, than shame on the club for not saving some of it to make needed moves in the winter.

As dour as this sounds I am still waiting to see the type of progress we were hoping for in August. Maybe they will build on that last 15 minutes against Arsenal. If not, I’m afraid nobody will be able to make the case we are progressing.

Leave a Reply