Mistakes and missed opportunities

[brontebilly]

Hindsight is easy but I wouldn't have signed Downing in summer 2009 for 12m, I'd have signed Bent for 10m as he went to Sunderland for around that figure. Milner and Young would've just stayed on the flanks like they did the previous season. Gabby could've also played out wide again

Really we need a finisher in that team, gabby and Carew did well in that period but neither could get more than 15 league goals, we need someone to push onto 20 league goals. I'm convinced we would've made top 4 in 09-10.

Flip side though is Milner wouldn't have probably been moved to central midfield so our team performances might not have been so strong.....but we'd probably have kept him for a little longer as utility players don't tend to attract 20m + bids.

That's my last big what if moment as that's the last team we had that could compete at the top level of the prem.

12m was crazy money for Downing who was injured and had been gutless the season before with Boro going down.

But I'm not sure Bent would have been a huge success back then either. This was a time when Cuellar was at right back and Young at left back. At home teams used effectively bottle us up by forcing our full backs to have the ball, not sure Bent would have been able to help us out then, sure more than Heskey but Gabby and Carew had very effective stints up front alone and/or together around that time.

Strange but in 07/08 we got 71 league goals, our best return for about 20 years in front of goal. In 08/09 (54) and 09/10 (52), defensive solidity came at a price.

The fabled number ten would have been a better bet than Bent I suspect.

[Ad@m]

Yeah go back to summer of 97 and signing Collymore was an error. At the time we were a regular in the top 5 and weren't far off a title challenging team but Collymore just upset the team dynamic (pretty sure we started playing Yorke in midfield?!) and the dressing room.

I think I may have been the only one who didn't want Collymore.
Savo and Yorke were beginning to form a lethal partnership, the bringing in of Collymore upset the balance.

As tom says, though, Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Absolutely.  I didn't want him either and as you say, it completely disrupted the team.

Most of our mistakes and missed opportunities are of Ellis's making.  The late 90s were pivotal for the state of the game at the moment.  That was when the Champions League started expanding and the TV money skyrocketed.  If Ellis had gone the extra step we all knew the team needed in the mid-90s we'd have been up there to take advantage of the expanding Champions League.  As it happened, we weren't and have been playing catch up ever since.

Now I think we're too far away and with the arrival of Abramovich and the Sheihk it'll be a long time before we are at that top table again.

[Irish villain]

Actually in hindsight, we didn't buy well enough after the first sixth finish. You have just reminded me how exciting the 0708  season was with some terrific performances. We spent a lot that summer to effectively stand still.

[TopDeck113]

Saunders leaving was a big mistake - and I suspect, with hindsight, he'd agree that it was for him, too.  Although I still reckon we wouldn't have won the European Cup with him still in charge.  Tony Barton somehow re-galvanised the squad at the back end at what must rank as one of the worst-ever post-war title defences. 

The departure of SGT to be Fleet Street's Turnip still hurts.  We would have won silverware during the early 90s under Taylor, possibly the League, when you consider that the following year an iffy Arsenal won the Championship in 91 and the year after it was Leeds...

[SoccerHQ]

I just think Bent would've been good for our style of player. Milner and Young hitting in crosses every 5 minutes, Bent would've clinically finished more of them off than obviously Heskey and Gabby.

I'm sure that would've resulted in a couple of those frustrating home draws into three points. One that sticks out in my mind was drawing 0-0 at home to Wigan when we hit the post twice and had 3 cleared off the line, I'm sure Bent would've stuck one of those away. Not sure if it was 08/09 or the following season.

Number 10? No idea where he would've fitted in MON's rigid 4-4-2. The closest we had was Maloney really who was just a squad player.

[brontebilly]

think little's inability to maintain discipline behind the scenes with the various playboys at the club was the reason we stagnated. but that was moreso the year after following the addition of one Stanley Collymore.

Can you expand on this?  Not sure what you're referring to.

ah there was rumours galore around that time re the antics of a number of players at the club off the pitch including bosnich, charles, hendrie, yorke and curcic

the infamous bosnich and yorke sex tape being the prime example

little didnt have the fergie like iron fist to bring these lads into line and had his own problems too later on in that regard

pity because we were played some great football under little including the league cup final in 96. should have kicked on considering the players we had.

[Damo70]

Saunders leaving was a big mistake - and I suspect, with hindsight, he'd agree that it was for him, too.  Although I still reckon we wouldn't have won the European Cup with him still in charge.  Tony Barton somehow re-galvanised the squad at the back end at what must rank as one of the worst-ever post-war title defences. 

The departure of SGT to be Fleet Street's Turnip still hurts.  We would have won silverware during the early 90s under Taylor, possibly the League, when you consider that the following year an iffy Arsenal won the Championship in 91 and the year after it was Leeds...

You make a good point. I think Ron Saunders last game was a 4-1 thrashing at Old Trafford that dropped us into the bottom six. So apart from taking over a side in the quarter finals of the European Cup and going on to win it Tony Barton also took us about half a dozen places up the league to safety. Although it would appear Ron Saunders had only been allowed to bring in one player to strengthen the title winning team. A problem that Tony Barton had under Bendall and Doug. Between the start of the 1980 season and the start of the 1984 season a team that had won their league and then become champions of Europe bought a total of six players in four years and sold probably twice that number.

[Monty]

Strange though it may seem to say, I think MON not getting/taking the England job after Schteve went can be looked at as a real missed opportunity. Had he gone then, and we had appointed a proper footballing manager at the time when MON had laid the decent groundwork and Randy still had money to spend, the future could have been very different.

[KevinGage]

Selling Gary Penrice and Sticks Ormondroyd within a few weeks of each other in the Autumn of 1991.  Proof positive that we had given up.

[villa `cross the mersey]

I just count myself lucky enough to see us go from Third Division Champions to European Champions inside 11 years . Much is made of Wimbledon going from non - league to FA Cup winners etc, however Villa`s achievement is constantly overlooked.
As ever with the Villa its all about continuity - we never seem to maintain a stable base from which to bring about continued success - too many boardroom upheavals, changes of manager and poor signings. I feel sorry for VCTM jnr as he is highly unlikely to witness what I have, following this great club - the saddest thing right now is that neither of us can see any light at the end of the tunnel with the current set up and renewing our seats next season seems highly unlikely - as stated previously - when the ambition returns so will we.

[dave.woodhall]

A lot of the mistakes cited are just the way decisions were made; nobody knows how events would have turned out regardless of what happened and in the words of John Gregory, Hindsight United have never lost a match.

However, and this is something I could write a university thesis about because I said it then, I've said it ever since and when two or more who were present at the time get together they always say it. From Italia '90 until 2002, and in particular between the 1996 League Cup final and the 2000 FA Cup final, no club had the planets align to give them the opportunity to join the elite as often as Villa did. During the biggest boom period English football has ever known, a time when for the first time ever, the monied and literary classes were interested in football, we were the only show in town for a massive chunk of the country. From Manchester to London and from Ireland to the North Sea, there was no other club worth talking about and a whole generation of West Midlands children grew up only knowing the Villa locally in the Premier League. And all we were bothered about was being the biggest club in Birmingham. In 1994 we had the Republic's World Cup captain and their most popular player of all time - you couldn't buy a Villa shirt in Dublin. We had three Muslims in the first team when clubs were desperate to tap in to the UK Asian market - we did nothing to promote the fact. The south-west, then as now, is where Brummies emigrated. You'd struggle to buy a Villa shirt in Worcester, thirty miles away. One club had a visible presence in Birmingham city centre - Manchester Fucking United.

Other clubs were beginning to see the importance of proper media relations and marketing. When asked why we still didn't have a press officer, the master businessman said that we'd tried it before and the media always wanted to speak directly to him. That was thirty years earlier. We didn't have a database of supporters; season ticket holders would get a renewal form and that was it. No reminders, no follow-ups or attempts to get lapsed holders back. I worked harder on renewing H&V subscribers than the club did for season tickets. I could fill a book with the jaw-dropping idiocy they were coming up with at this time, but to give one example they were obsessed with unofficial merchandise - the biggest sales of Villa licensed gear outside Birmingham came from a shop at Merry Hill. The owner unwittingly stocked some counterfeit stuff once. Instead of having a quiet word Villa went in all guns blazing and took him to court, then wonder why he stopped selling their merchandise. Every other club of any size was becoming a supermarket, Villa were a corner shop. We were, as Hyder Jaward said in the Post, the first club to enter the twentieth century and the last big club to leave it.

As a result of this mentality, when Small Heath got promoted in 2002 they were making the headlines, they were seen as the progressive club of the city. We had a ten year start on them, they caught us up within weeks and thank God their inate Birmingham Cityness prevailed because otherwise we would have really been in trouble.

That was the time we could have joined the elite without splashing out; now a billionaire couldn't buy our place there.

[paulcomben]

This is a great idea for a thread, because it could literally be infinite. Each individual match has such moments - more & more the way our team is set up nowadays. Then, the historic matches and seasons and parts of seasons and then managers and players and directors... What I have learned with experience is that missed opportunities are usually underrated and always bite our team in the ass. Minimising such mistakes seems to be how the successful teams prevail.

[paulcomben]

Dave, that may well be your best post of all time. And you ain't exactly lacking good uns. In short, it was all down to Ellis being a typical self made parochial millionaire, with loads of dosh yet no capability for true business acumen. Sorry to say, but there is something archetypally Brummy about being two steps off the pace commercially. As JLR strikingly proves right now what the second city and its people are capable of, it is galling that they lacked such good leaders in the 20th century.

[Irish villain]

You should write that thesis/book Dave based on that post above.

When I get a new group of students I always have ice-breakers where I ask everybody to tell the group about where they come from and what they are into. I always begin by talking about where I grew up and the fact that I am a villa fan and the mature students always say 'yeah, you look about the age that grew up in the mid 90s, when a lot of kids seemed to be villa fans'.

[dave.woodhall]

Dave, that may well be your best post of all time. And you ain't exactly lacking good uns. In short, it was all down to Ellis being a typical self made parochial millionaire, with loads of dosh yet no capability for true business acumen. Sorry to say, but there is something archetypally Brummy about being two steps off the pace commercially. As JLR strikingly proves right now what the second city and its people are capable of, it is galling that they lacked such good leaders in the 20th century.

Awww, shucks. Doug was undoubtedly the right man in 1968 but by the turn of the century he was woefully outdated. As Martin Swain (who could say this far better and with much greater insight than I) put it, he still had the mentality that £1 million was a major fee and £5k a week got you a star, when by then they were reserve team figures. There were so many other things we had going for us - flotation, the NTL deal, first club back in Europe, our local rivals being at their worst-ever - that you can only look back and wonder why we never took off properly. And you have to look at the one constant at the club throughout that time. To paraphrase Sir Graham, "He could make Aston Villa good but he could never make them great."