Not keen on that article, sorry.

Felt a bit like a MOTD preamble but with some questionable points:

The bit about us being unfortunate with Houllier's health problems. The first issue is that his heart troubles were widely known, so we took an unnecessary risk; the second is that he was doing a pretty shit job anyway.

I don't like Gerrard, but his appointment was not 'the most bizarre since Gregory'. McLeish and RDM made far less sense - and arguably SGT2 & Garde.

This may be more of a personal point, but I never gave Smith more latitude than anybody else, and I'm not sure that many others did. There was plenty of criticism of him. I wasn't impressed with his appointment, but he got us up in his first season, kept us up in his second and we were mid-table in his third, but his legacy as the only Villa manager in a quarter of a century who has achieved his objectives is minimised with talk about it being all down to Grealish, as if getting an exceptional player to perform is a negative for a manager.

But yeah, apologies to the author, but the bits I don't disagree with are truisms.

The bit about us being unfortunate with Houllier's health problems. The first issue is that his heart troubles were widely known, so we took an unnecessary risk; the second is that he was doing a pretty shit job anyway.

I don't like Gerrard, but his appointment was not 'the most bizarre since Gregory'. McLeish and RDM made far less sense - and arguably SGT2 & Garde.

Agreed on Houllier, there is quite a degree of revisionism at play about his time in charge at Villa Park. Falling out with a core of senior players almost immediately and having us anywhere near a relegation battle was dreadful management. Not to mind being backed heavily in signing Bent and Makoun in January. If MON had been given those funds by Lerner a few months previously it's likely we would still have been very competitive even without Milner.

I suspect the author has simply forgotten about the idiotic decision by Lerner to bring in McLeish, despite the rancid football I thought he suffered a surreal amount of bad luck with injuries/illness to key players. RDM had a recent promotion under his belt at West Brom, so there was logic there. Same for Remi Garde who did a fine job at Lyon in trying circumstances before us and was a somewhat logical choice to get the best out of some young talented French players. SGT2 was a poor decision for sure, some misty eyed romanticism at play from Ellis.

Gerrard was an unnecessary gamble and Purslow should have paid for it with his own job (and might yet do shortly).

Yippee, another Houlier debate.

A potted history of Villa managerial appointments in the last 50 years.
Yet no mention of the last one to win a proper trophy for us or the one that won the biggest of all.

Sorry for being a bit harsh in my post above. It's a better article than I could manage, and I wasn't very fair. My apologies to the author.

Point taken with Tony Barton. But Brian Little built a fine new team generally signing young but proven players. Wright, Southgate, Taylor, Draper, Milosevic, Joachim, Johnson all had varying degrees of success. Curcic was his stand out duff signing. If only Collymore had come off we could have had something really special.

Agree with all that, remember being particularly excited going into the 95-96 season after the summer's business.