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Having been
overtaken by Reading over the weekend Aston Villa find themselves in the bottom
3 and with only 9 points from 12 games they are off to their worst start in 40
years and in danger of being drawn into a season-long relegation battle. Paul
Lambert has been given the ‘dreaded’ vote of confidence already and I will be
looking at exactly what Lambert has to dread and if his players can drag him
out of this sticky mess.
The Manager:
Paul
Lambert has had a management career spanning seven years and five different
divisions but his first real success came in his third job at Norwich
where he became the first manager in 11 years to take a team from League One to
the Premiership in 2 years, a feat replicated by Nigel Adkins last year with Southampton. This was impressive no doubt, especially as
he then guided Norwich
to mid-table safety with a 12th placed finish. It may now seem
foolish to have taken the Aston Villa job as his former team sits 5 places and
5 points ahead of his current side. But we have seen managers before take jobs
at teams lower in the league with more ‘potential,’ most notably Harry Redknap’s
switch from Portsmouth to Tottenham, and have large amounts of success, so
perhaps we shouldn’t be judging too soon. It has been, however, a long time
since Aston Villa could consider themselves a ‘top team’ and Paul Lambert faces
a tough job organising his mixture of youth and experience into something
resembling a top-half team, as must be his ambition.
Will he
be the first manager to be sacked? Despite his poor run of form the best odds you can get on Paul Lambert
being the first to go are 28/1, which is very long considering the place in
which he finds himself. However we mustn’t forget that chairmen are very
reluctant to fire a manager whom they hired at the beginning of the season for
fear of scaring off any managers who might have been interested in the post. Randy
Lerner isn’t always the quickest off the mark to get rid of a failing manager,
Alex McLeish survived a whole season despite floundering in the depths of the
league for most of last season so you have got to feel that Lambert will be
given a fair crack at the whip, especially if Lerner buys into Lambert’s policy
of buying youth and building a team for the long term.
Does he
deserve to be sacked?
I don’t’ think so, certainly not yet. Sure, Villa are not where they want to be
but there are still 26 league games to play and with the right run of form and
perhaps a few new signings in January Aston Villa could well find themselves
closer to the middle of the table than the bottom come the end of the season. It
is certainly clear that sacking Lambert just after he has tried to implement a
new system will not get Aston Villa anywhere quickly.
The Team
Key
Players: Aston
Villa have the kind of squad that, if they all played well together, could be
pushing for 9th or 10th spot.
You only
have to look at someone like Darren Bent,
who has long be maligned as a colossal waste of money, to see that there is potential
there; he has scored 50 league goals in the last 3 seasons alone. This season he
has been in and out of the team with injuries and also having been the victim
of a system which has only got one striker and has had to share that role with
new signing Christian Benteke.
Ciaran Clark is shouldering a lot of the responsibility at
centre back which, for a 23-year-old, is a big responsibility. He is going to
have to grow up fast if he is going to organise this Villa defence, a defence which
has already conceded 21 goals this season.
Another big
player for the team is Brad Guzan. I’ve
said it before and I’ll say it again, goalkeepers can make the difference for a
relegated side and Brad Guzan has being playing very well so far this season,
stepping into the large gloves of Shay Given.
Players
who need to do better: Stephen Ireland is a
frustratingly inconsistent football player. We all know from his time at Manchester City that he is a very talented guy but
we also know that he is a confidence player and it would seem that he has been
out of confidence for quite some time now. This is not helped by the fact that
he is at a struggling team and is not surrounded by world class players. In a
team full of youth Ireland needs to be the shining light and guide the
youngsters through what could well be a tough season rather than shying away
from this responsibility.
Barry Bannan is another player who needs to start proving
his worth to Villa. In a team where there is a lot of experience being young
can be used as an excuse and could earn you some much needed time to rest and
develop. Unfortunately for the youth in this team, Bannan at 22 still
definitely falls into this bracket, there is no opportunity for this slow
development. Bannan has no goals and 1 or 2 assists (depending on your source) which
is not good enough from an attacking central midfielder who has made 10 league
appearances already this season.
Verdict:
This is a
tough one to call, it is very difficult to predict relegation for a side who
have been in the top flight for the last 24 years but we know that reputation
goes for very little in this league. Villa fans can take solace in the fact
that they have a decent squad of players and a manager who has previous success
of keeping a club afloat in the Premier League. I think a lot hinges on the end
of the season for Aston Villa, I can’t see them moving up to mid-table before
Christmas and so they will rely on a good run sometime after the end of January
to save themselves. What Villa fans will worry about is that there is not a
great deal of experience in this team, and when it comes to messy relegation
scraps it is often experience that saves the day. Lambert will therefore need
his current youthful squad to steel themselves for a difficult campaign and
perhaps get in a few experienced heads in the January transfer window. I do
believe that they can save themselves and I think that they will probably
replicate their finish of last season. 16th
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