The Aston Villa of Alex McLeish: Down Amongst the Dead?
The Aston Villa of Alex McLeish: Down Amongst the Dead?
As Fernando Torres streaked implausibly through, tiptoed around Victor Valdes and rolled home to plunge a fervid Camp Nou into agonising self-doubt last night, a very different footballing psychodrama was playing out in the West Midlands.
The Aston Villa of Alex McLeish - a man whose football is so nihilistic, his programme notes could be ghosted by Ayn Rand - were constructing their last attacks of a desperate night, an exhausted heavyweight’s sweat-blinded haymakers when he’s down on all the scorecards. But Bolton held firm - in as much as Bolton, who typically display the tensile strength of loose blancmange, ever hold firm - and as Barry Bannan’s last-ditch southpaw swing ran wide, Villa found themselves thigh-deep in the relegation quicksand. The exotic, garlicky otherness of a European campaign had been within the Villans’ reach as recently as two years ago.
Now they’re one of five sides checking on what the facilities for visiting teams are like at Oakwell, just in case. All are, in their own way, desperately poor sides, stumbling about in the basement of a league that has rivalled an Ed Wood film for comic ineptitude this season; and as Arsène Wenger waspishly observed of Wigan, ‘no one has stolen the points from them.’ Teetering on the precipice, two must follow the tumbling form of stoic, sad-eyed Terry Connor into the howling void.
Let’s take the Latics first; after all, until the start of April everyone else seemed to be able to. They’re intriguingly different to their muck-and-bullets rivals at the foot of the table. Not for them is the grim verticality, direct play and constant deadening, aimless running about you expect of struggling teams in the Premier League. Rather, they’re the kind of team who should be suited to the warmer months like a footballing Kid Creole and the Coconuts; all slick interchanges and ball-zipping enthusiasm - and from looking dead and buried in March, earnest supply teacher Roberto Martinez’s side have doggedly clawed their way up the cliff face with some brilliant results against the top teams.
That their richly-deserved win over Manchester United was secured with a beautiful parabolic curler from Shaun Maloney is unfortunately telling - Wigan don’t have a striker who can consistently convert the chances their meticulous approach play provides, and depend on interventions from their advanced midfielders. Without mercurial dribble factory Victor Moses, their paltry scoring record (they’ve scored 0.97 goals per game this season) would have been vanishingly small and their Premier League parachute payments would have been as good as deposited by now. If Hugo Rodallega was as good as his agent seems to think, Wigan would be reclining comfortably in 10th; yet they remain one dependable striker short of security. With Wolves and Blackburn to come, they should secure the four points which would leave them effectively safe - but it could all have been a little more straightforward had they emerged from hibernation sooner.
And so to Blackburn; the hilarious dysfunctional family headed up by resented weekend dad Steve Kean. Through injuries, defections, fan protests and the ongoing battle to secure planning permission for the inexorable widening of Yakubu’s backside, Rovers have somehow just kept on going. That they’re not very good is unquestionable, though we’re as shocked as Venky’s that buying Bradley Orr didn’t propel them into the Champions League on a wave of heady euphoria. Relegation looks like a sad inevitability for a poorly-run club with a badly imbalanced squad and a manager palpably out of his depth, and the fact they’re not down already owes a great deal to the languid heroics of their big-boned Nigerian hitman (and the fact that repetitive long balls copied from the Charles Hughes Recidivist Guide to Coaching can still, sometimes, catch defences unawares). Rovers’ demotion could be confirmed by the time they go to Stamford Bridge on the final day; if so, a sojourn in the Championship might persuade Venky’s to relinquish control, allow the club to gather its strength and draw some of the poison which has so weakened them this year.
Owen Coyle arrived at Bolton with a self-honed reputation for getting his teams to ‘play football’. In recent months, however, he’s proven himself to be more of a Paisley Pulis, and his rough-edged, belligerent team have unashamedly left no trick unturned in their scramble for survival. In spite of this, this Wanderers side is oddly bloodless and lacking in personality; they’re not laughably inept, bitterly destructive or trying to keep it on the carpet against the odds - they’re just sort of there, like a grimly determined Mars bar lodged in a vending machine. Occasionally they’ll produce not entirely unexpected wins - 10 this season, more than any other team in the bottom six. Sometimes they’ll go on long, but barely-noticable winless runs. And that’s that. They’re not Sam Allardyce’s team, all gilded veneer, luxury veterans, deep tans and percentage football; they’re not Gary Megson’s team, a nasty, lumpen side its own mother couldn’t love. They’re Owen Coyle’s Bolton, and they’re sidling edgily up and down at the bottom of the top division – which is probably where you’ll see them next season.
We are left only with the eccentric, bipolar QPR. The Hoops underwent a mid-season personality transplant which saw a surprisingly gun-shy and conservative Neil Warnock replaced by ambition’s Mark Hughes. Lovably batty new owner and Shepherd’s Bush pub crawl fan Tony Fernandes hurled a wad of cash at a host of new players, and the future was looking brighter than a Malaysian Airlines stewardess’ smile. Unsurprisingly, the new acquisitions - most of whom are fractionally too good for a relegation battle - have taken time to bed in. Hughes made his characteristic slow start, Barton, Cisse and Diakite (a human hand grenade in football boots) gathered reds with more zeal than Joseph McCarthy, and optimism stalled. However, the recent, overdue flourishing of Adel Taarabt at the season’s business end (though naturally accompanied by an obligatory dismissal against Spurs) along with growing contributions from Barton, Diakite, Kenny and the sumptuous Alejandro Faurlin have seen Rangers steadily improve. Momentum - and quality - could be on their side.
Which brings us, inevitably, back to Villa, whose momentum is all in the wrong direction: a team going nowhere but down and getting worse, and one for whom the drop would come as an ego-bruising culture shock. Relegation, like any defeat, brings on a crisis of identity. While that disorientation experienced by Barcelona in the wake of their Champions League elimination and relative domestic failure will be altogether more refined and deliberative, they won’t be alone in considering their place in the world this summer. Dressing rooms in Birmingham, West London and Lancashire could be facing up to some unpalatable new realities too. And ordering their Barnsley A-Zs.
Andrew writes for The Substitution, a new football blog full of vibrant content. Comments below please.
