Aston Villa, while having a proud history, has always been an enigma. Very few clubs can go from the very top to relegation with such speed. Our history should always have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of having too much hope.
We now seem to be in the most stable position, off the field, than we ever have been, at a time when football has become more precarious than it’s ever been. That is one of the most Aston Villa things to happen.
While I was incredibly young when we lifted the European Cup, I was old enough to suffer the almost visceral slagging off, when we were subsequently relegated in 1987 under Billy McNeill, a short five years after lifting the most prestigious trophy in world football. Growing up in Ireland, where most people were fans of either Liverpool or Man Utd, I was considered to be a freak.
Doug Ellis had sold the club for the first time in 1975, buying it again in 1982, after that monumental success The beginning of his second tenure, however, was not very successful. He didn’t want to be reminded of the success we achieved without him, apparently. That great team was pretty much disassembled. This is not, however, about those days. This article is about where we are now.
It may be premature to suggest that we now have the right manager and, indeed, it may come back to bite me, but this feels like we have finally made the right appointment. There seems to be a common denominator amongst elite managers. They all look certifiably insane on the touchline from time to time during games. It’s a joy to watch a manager become animated and passionate in his technical area, rather than watching the likes of Gerard slumped in his seat, very much looking like a man devoid of ideas. The last manager whose sanity one could justifiably question, due to his technical area antics, was O’Neill. That, however, may be one of the only similarities between the two men.
O’Neill was well respected before he took the Celtic job, but expectations were so low at the time, he joined without the usual level of fanfare one would expect from such a passionate fanbase. The previous season, Rangers had finished 21 points ahead of Celtic and had won the domestic treble. In his first season in charge, O’Neill won the domestic treble himself, winning the league with a few games to spare. Stiliyan Petrov said of O’Neill, “For me, his a very special person, not just as a manager, but as a human being as well. He gave me the opportunity to become something. He made me a winner. He made me believe I could win things.”
That quote may give us a window into what life was like under O’Neill’s management. When O’Neill was unveiled as Aston Villa manager on the 4th of August 2006, every Villa fan was excited and even the usual Villa-shy football pundits were talking of good things to come. We had been flirting with relegation under a very split dressing room under the divisive character of David O’Leary and O’Neill was seen as very much the messiah. He was not a training ground manager and would occasionally not even attend training sessions. John Robertson and Steve Walford looked after training. This is also telling.
O’Neill was a great man manager, but we should never underestimate the influence of Robertson and Walford. Even O’Neill’s tactics were quite linear. Counter attacking football with two pacy wingers and a big man up top. For three seasons it worked like a charm but, like every year, we’d get to March and teams had us well figured out. I’m not saying O’Neill was a bad manager because he most certainly wasn’t three successive sixth place finished tells you that. At Villa, he never won a game in March. That stat was the difference between us getting Champions League and not.
I also wouldn’t blame O’Neill for our demise. He was passionate. He wanted to hear that Champions League theme played loud and proud at Villa Park. He had experienced it at Celtic Park and he wanted more. Randy Lerner had to tighten the purse strings. Several financially impacting events, including his divorce, had hamstrung him and he began to lose interest in Villa. This article, however, is not about the absolute calamity that followed. I won’t speak about the catalogue of disastrous managers we appointed, pretty much until Smith, even though Bruce deserves a modicum of credit for steadying the ship. I also won’t write about the disastrous Dr X, Villa’s very own Bond villain – more likely to be and Austin Powers villain, really.
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O’Neill quit in the week leading up to our opening game of the season, and that had a massive impact. However, his career after Villa can hardly be called stellar. Stints with Sunderland and Forest weren’t successful at all, and his stint at Ireland, while he did ok, unravelled towards the end. How can an elite manager go into decline so quickly? I think the answer is very simple. John Robertson had to retire after Villa, for health reasons. The dream team of O’Neill, Robertson and Walford was no more. It is no coincidence that this parting of the ways heralded a definite decline in O’Neill’s career.
While Smith will rightfully be remembered as a Villa legend and we all have a lot of love for him, I think even he would agree that he wasn’t the man to take us to the level we needed to be at. Having said that, we were in safer hands with him than the man who replaced him
Back in 2006, it could be argued that Celtic and Rangers could have come into the Premier League and challenged for top half finishes. That Celtic team had Henrick Larson, Mark Viduka, Petrov and Chris Sutton, amongst other players who would have walked on to any PL team. Indeed, Larson went on to play for Man Utd and Barcelona after leaving Celtic. The SPL now has gone through its own metamorphosis and the level has dropped. That fact cannot be ignored, when looking at Gerard’s Rangers tenure. One trophy out of a possible twelve, during his time there, should have been taken into consideration. Villa was always going to be too big a step up.
We hired Gerard and, apart from an initial bounce, he was an unmitigated disaster. He created issues, rather than solving the problems we had. The captaincy debacle was embarrassing. Playing players out of position, not playing players into form and generally playing way too narrow, were not the actions of a competent manager. I could go on, but this article would become a book.
I think the brief Gerard era may have been even more frustrating than our relegation season in 15/16. We had the right owners, the right ownership model. We had passionate owners who were investing heavily, not just in the playing staff but in the physical infrastructure of Aston Villa. We had all the ingredients in place, except a proper manager. Enter Unai Emery.
The fact that he had even been selected to take over after a transformative and successful Arsene Wenger era was impressive enough. The fact that he took a declining Arsenal on a 22-game unbeaten run and was sacked with a 56%-win rate is nothing short of disgraceful. Arsenal missed out on Professor Emery’s University, but he went on to have major success in Europe and now he’s at Villa. We can now look at Villa in the same way that we looked at Villa under O’Neill. There will be no relegation battles under this manager. He knows how to win. He craves winning.
From his first training session, he is running with the players and shouting at them to press press press. He’s not standing there with his arms folded, wondering if he did the lotto before he came to work. He is animated in the technical area, and he isn’t afraid of making substitutions. He is making players better already. McGinn has come on a lot. Mings, while our best defender for years, is now finding consistency in his game, that had he has so badly needed. Make no mistake, this manager is the real deal.
So, the difference between O’Neill and Emery is quite simple. Emery is everything O’Neill was, but he is so much more. He’s a coach and he can adjust his tactics several times during a game. He plays a hybrid formation, which very few managers could make work. If you’ve ever seen a murmuring of starlings, it’s the only way I can describe Villa’s formation. We move from a 6-2-2 to a 4-4-2 to a 4-2-2-2 to a 4-3-2-1 all in one game.
Make no mistake, we have an elite manager, and he will need time to bring back the glory days, but he’s the best man for the job. We need to give him time.
Up The Villa. John.
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