Express and star reporting randy has vowed not to bow to the wishes of the supporters .
When we were experiencing the great Randy Lerner love-in of 2006-09, I said on here that the time for judging him as an owner was not when everything was on the up, but when he’d had to deal with the poor seasons, a managerial appointment or two and the ensuing backlash from sections of the fans. At that point, we’d have more of an idea as to whether the club was in as capable a pair of hands as we were being led to believe. Events of the last twelve months or so are leading to me to seriously question as whether Lerner really is the right man to be taking Aston Villa forward. In my mind, the first serious error was to allow the relationship with Martin O’Neill to cool to the extent that the manager walked out when he did. We’re not the first club where the relationship between Chairman and manager irrevocably breakdowns, but the trick is to see the warning signs and either get rid of the manager at a more opportune time, or to try and reconcile the differences. This wasn’t done, MON flounced off – and recently was rewarded for doing so – and meanwhile Lerner’s insistence on doing the right thing by other clubs sees us appointing a has-been from a tiny pool of candidates. The breakdown between Lerner and MON was in my view compounded by the appointment of Paul Faulkner as Chief Executive and the person running the show in absentia. Whatever Faulkner brought to MBNA, it is increasingly manifest these are not the skill-set necessary to do the day-to-day running of a top Premier League football club. Lerner’s absences in themselves are not particularly a problem - Sheikh Mansour rarely attends Eastlands – but what he needs is a management team that can run the club in his absence. Wanting that done in a particularly ethical way is fine, but there also needs to be people steeped in the murkier ways of the football world. Man City, for example, has Garry Cook and Brian Marwood. The third serious error is the fact that there appears to be no contingency planning for the situation that the club now finds itself in. This smacks of rank poor management from the top down. Even prior to his ill-health, there must have been doubts as to whether Houllier was the right man for the job. The fact that we are scrambling around now for, depending who you believe, our third, fourth or fifth choice, shows a complete lack of foresight. The fact that the choice appears to be someone completely unacceptable to the majority of the fans just compounds the error. We had a couple of months from when Houllier fell ill to get our ducks in a row, and it should have been a case of “Bye, Gerard; Hello, X.” Finally, there is the small matter of Lerner’s refusal to speak with the electronic media, and only to communicate intermittently with the written media. On the face of it there doesn’t seem too much wrong with this, as the club as a whole has continued to put people up for interview/comment. However, it creates a reservoir of resentment amongst the broadcasters and journalists, that then gets released in the negative reporting we are experiencing at present. So, when the above are considered, do we really have, as has been regularly trumpeted over the last five years “The Best Owner in the League”? I’m sure there is a case for the defence, but in the spirit of the adversarial system, I’ll leave it to others to present that.
Quote from: TopDeck113 on June 13, 2011, 08:31:36 PMWhen we were experiencing the great Randy Lerner love-in of 2006-09, I said on here that the time for judging him as an owner was not when everything was on the up, but when he’d had to deal with the poor seasons, a managerial appointment or two and the ensuing backlash from sections of the fans. At that point, we’d have more of an idea as to whether the club was in as capable a pair of hands as we were being led to believe. Events of the last twelve months or so are leading to me to seriously question as whether Lerner really is the right man to be taking Aston Villa forward. In my mind, the first serious error was to allow the relationship with Martin O’Neill to cool to the extent that the manager walked out when he did. We’re not the first club where the relationship between Chairman and manager irrevocably breakdowns, but the trick is to see the warning signs and either get rid of the manager at a more opportune time, or to try and reconcile the differences. This wasn’t done, MON flounced off – and recently was rewarded for doing so – and meanwhile Lerner’s insistence on doing the right thing by other clubs sees us appointing a has-been from a tiny pool of candidates. The breakdown between Lerner and MON was in my view compounded by the appointment of Paul Faulkner as Chief Executive and the person running the show in absentia. Whatever Faulkner brought to MBNA, it is increasingly manifest these are not the skill-set necessary to do the day-to-day running of a top Premier League football club. Lerner’s absences in themselves are not particularly a problem - Sheikh Mansour rarely attends Eastlands – but what he needs is a management team that can run the club in his absence. Wanting that done in a particularly ethical way is fine, but there also needs to be people steeped in the murkier ways of the football world. Man City, for example, has Garry Cook and Brian Marwood. The third serious error is the fact that there appears to be no contingency planning for the situation that the club now finds itself in. This smacks of rank poor management from the top down. Even prior to his ill-health, there must have been doubts as to whether Houllier was the right man for the job. The fact that we are scrambling around now for, depending who you believe, our third, fourth or fifth choice, shows a complete lack of foresight. The fact that the choice appears to be someone completely unacceptable to the majority of the fans just compounds the error. We had a couple of months from when Houllier fell ill to get our ducks in a row, and it should have been a case of “Bye, Gerard; Hello, X.” Finally, there is the small matter of Lerner’s refusal to speak with the electronic media, and only to communicate intermittently with the written media. On the face of it there doesn’t seem too much wrong with this, as the club as a whole has continued to put people up for interview/comment. However, it creates a reservoir of resentment amongst the broadcasters and journalists, that then gets released in the negative reporting we are experiencing at present. So, when the above are considered, do we really have, as has been regularly trumpeted over the last five years “The Best Owner in the League”? I’m sure there is a case for the defence, but in the spirit of the adversarial system, I’ll leave it to others to present that.What you've written is a load of bollocks. The defence rests.
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Topic: Randy Lerner: a good owner? The case for the prosecution (Read 34585 times)
