It is easy to get swept away in a media storm of nightmarish news stories. This week has certainly been a bad one for Aston Villa. However, it is nothing remarkable, unexpected or all that different to “business as usual”.
The only difference? We are increasingly in the public eye for our cringe-worthy inability to run a football club.
Be it through building a football team to avoid humiliation on national television (Liverpool most recently), our inability to get our public relations in order (Lescott) or watching club employees openly resigning. It is amateurish.
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This is unfortunately nothing new to us Villa fans, it is just the final culminating whirrings of a club that can no longer be patched up. We can no longer limp over the finishing line of the Premier League, no more will a saviour emerge from the playing staff and certainly no statesmen exists at the club to lead us forward.
It is truly as grim as it is an impressive self destruction.
Grim because we have for so long been a dignified football club. Conducting ourselves professionally, if not successfully. Never did we stoop to some of the signings we have made. Never did we permit such petulance and self absorption dictate how things should be to a club, a community club, that pre-dates every single one of us.
We know who is to blame; Lerner and the astonishing conglomerate of incompetents he has brought together.
They are a Union of inane characters, almost inviting satire and ridicule through their every action or inaction. Lerner, Fox, Hollis, O’Reilly and Coco the clown. It is a combination previously only seen on the blue half of the city & even they didn’t have such an impressive array of dysfunction.
What does scare me is that for all of the certainties; our decay, relegation and further stagnation, we have no idea how long this torture will continue.
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Like a prisoner without rights we are forced to endure repeated rounds of mind-numbing interrogation. Periods of silence. Then more disorientating, confusing and disheartening treatment. Why? Why are we tolerating this?
A football club that is on it’s knees. On the foot of the table. One which makes no comment after an annihilation against a team we once competed with. One which hasn’t said a word after a player who has worn the Captain’s armband openly offers to meet someone face to face.
A club held to ransom over it’s own awful contractual dealings, inept recruitment of playing/non-playing staff & one which now see’s fit to throw out the naysayers, protect a CEO with security and make lifelong servants redundant.
Any football fan can take defeats, it is part and parcel of football, but being ashamed of how your club acts and is perceived is a new and unexpected twist.
We are a short sighted, pathetic mess of an organisation. One which would not be tolerated in the real world, outside of football.
All of these points, amongst many others I’ve made previously and some which aren’t listed here are the cancer that is ravaging our football club.
Clogging the arteries of passion, spreading like a toxin through a fan-base which even now turns out in some numbers in the hope of a remarkable change of tact. We are a desperate anti-dote, fighting blindly, hoping for a breakthrough.
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We should continue to support our football club, continue to remind those who have and continue to fail us of their culpability and blame. However, it is time for a change of tact.
Whether that means empty seats, tennis balls or clown masks I don’t know. It may mean all three, it might mean none of them.
What we really need is change & a means of removing the most destructive forces from Aston Villa.
That can only come through new ownership, which should be striven for aggressively, relentlessly and without a single thought other than ensuring that our great institution is allowed to hold its head high again.