There’s a saying isn’t there, ‘be careful what you wish for’. It’s a phrase oft trotted out by the friends of football managers who’re about to face the sack. Steve Bruce’s cronies, for example, were out in full force during the weeks leading up to their buddy’s sacking, imploring Villa supporters to appreciate what a good sort their old mate was and telling us how well qualified he was to gain us promotion. What a joke. These bellyachers were either deluded or disingenuous, bigging their old mucker up in a lame defence of his feeble Villa Park tenure when, if they had a scrap of objectivity, they’d be agreeing he was a footballing dinosaur fit only for the scrapheap. We’d become accustomed to ninety minute wars of attrition under Bruce, not games of football, pinning our hopes solely on our side being slightly less crap than the opposition and pleading for late winners through gritted teeth, knowing such goals represented a double edged sword; gaining us points but saving Bruce’s bacon. You’ve heard of buyer’s remorse, well there’s a footballing equivalent it seems to me for fans of clubs desperate for their manager to get the heave-ho yet paradoxically still inviting a football into the back of the opposition’s net. It says it all when fans in the Holte found themselves arguing whether they should suck the ball into the net for last minute winners or blow it into the dugout in the direction of the manager’s gonads.
By the time our big conked manager finally received his marching orders the damage had been done, he’d left behind a squad suffering such a bewildered state that football had become to them a sport they merely read about in the papers. Bruce’s pals bemoaned their chum’s dismissal, informing the Villa faithful that we were misguided when clamouring for his removal, we’d got it all wrong, and should be ‘careful what we wished for’. But this was an utter crock, the guy was a busted flush and had to go. Yes we may have lost a good man, however my Uncle Neil was a good egg too, that didn’t equip him to lead a dressing room of millionaires to the Premiership anymore than it equipped Bruce. And Uncle Neil would have done it for free. Thankfully however we’ve seen the last of Bruce’s Bournemouth sized backside at Villa Park and instead, in Dean Smith, we have got an even better man, a true Villaman, and once he’s been given sufficient opportunity to repair the shambolic defence inherited from the aforementioned, we’ll surely flourish.
This recent winter period has so far typified, in the main, the kind of reign we can expect from Dean Smith and most of us are lapping it up despite the warnings of Bruce’s pals. It’s been the complete opposite to Bruce’s ‘style’, ie. providing goals galore, excitement and energy as opposed to dogged dreariness and a brand of hoofball that even Pulis would disown. Yes we’ve had our share of car crashes (Forest, Leeds) but we’ve had excitement (again, Forest, Leeds) and a joyous victory over Blues which would never have been achievable under Steve Bruce. Most of all we have a new identity, a positive one, we’re synonymous with attacking football and not sterility, and while it’s regrettably complemented with kamikaze defending, none of us would swap scorelines of 5-5, 4-2 or even 2-3 in exchange for the relentless goalless stalemates and pinched one-nils, for and against.
Lest we forget, we’d become a live television nemesis for a nation of footballing viewers appalled by our output over recent seasons. Neutrals switched off and Villa supporters watched through their fingers as Bruce served up a type of football hardly deserving of any label other than ditchwater. Sky’s viewing figures would plummet when Villa’s name appeared on the schedule and who could blame them, we’d stink out the screen so often that discerning viewers turned off and in one infamous game (Spurs away), even our lone striker couldn’t be bothered to get involved, managing seven touches in the opening forty five minutes with three of those being restarts. If ever a player illustrated the malaise of our club it had to be Gabriel Agbonlahor, Bruce perhaps wasn’t the manager then but it he wasn’t, he shoulda been, so apt would it be.
So I say to Bruceonians, you Talksport pundits that formerly shared showers and matey backslaps with him, you Manchester-centric former pros who still suggest our erstwhile manager was the man for the job, I say thank you for your advice on what we might choose to wish for, we take onboard your offerings but can now announce our vindication of the wishful thinking you so contemptuously derided. Our full-on revival may take another season to come to pass, thanks chiefly to the carnage that your mate left behind particularly in our defensive quarters, but Smith is someone we can trust to put things right and we look forward to putting two fingers in the air to you neigh sayers as we triumphantly gain our Villa back. I doubt you’ll be there to see it, it’s hard to watch football when your noses are so approximate to your former teammates’ bottoms that you nigh on suffocate, but in truth we’d rather you weren’t there at all, it’ll be an invitation only party and instead you can join the queue of people who have written our club off in recent time. Be warned though, it’s a long line stretching from London’s Broadcasting House all the way to Salford Quay’s BBC studios, stopping off at Sandwell, a place where success is gauged using a different measure altogether. We may have been in the doldrums but we’re yet to judge success or failure purely on the outcome of two local derbies a season. In Deano we trust.
