The Martin O'Neill thread (with added sacking #2188)

[kippaxvilla2]

He was ambitious, Young Doug isn't as ambitious, so he walked.  Poor timing I will concede that. 

Young Doug? Christ.

He's not Young Doug now he is Doug.  Retreats.

[passport1]

Thanks for your incisive input Adrian. There must be a shortage of phone in fools to talk to.

[ez]

He was ambitious, Young Doug isn't as ambitious, so he walked.  Poor timing I will concede that. 

Young Doug? Christ.

He's not Young Doug now he is Doug.  Retreats.

Anyone remember that fanzine comic strip called Young Doug?

[Rudy65]

Adrian Durham should prepare to be sued.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3535308/Martin-O-Neill-share-blame-Aston-Villa-s-sorry-demise-club-s-rot-started-reckless-spending.html

Absolute crock of shite. We have made a few poor decisions since MON walked

[Mister E]

Adrian Durham should prepare to be sued.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3535308/Martin-O-Neill-share-blame-Aston-Villa-s-sorry-demise-club-s-rot-started-reckless-spending.html

Absolute crock of shite. We have made a few poor decisions since MON walked

The MON walkout sowed the seeds for RL's loss of interest in the club; it presaged the cost-cutting ethos we've seen since; it left behind a host of highly-paid journeymen that sucked in resources that could have been used more usefully.
Yes, there have been some terrible decisions since; but they are anchored in the events of August 2010.

Sad, sad, sad.

[garyshawsknee]

He was ambitious, Young Doug isn't as ambitious, so he walked.  Poor timing I will concede that. 

Young Doug? Christ.

He's not Young Doug now he is Doug.  Retreats.

Anyone remember that fanzine comic strip called Young Doug?

I do and I'm not that old.

[paul_e]

He's not wrong.  We spent the best part of £200m and a couple of years after he left we'd made about half of it back and had a squad that wasn't fit for purpose and that's not even touching on the crippling wage bill that he left.

There have been poor decisions since he left, McLeish and his signings of Hutton, Given and Nzogbia at the forefront of those, but we've been on shaky foundations for years and they were laid by MON.

[Sexual Ealing]

But there have been plenty of opportunities to fix the foundations. If the MON experience was all it took to make Lerner flounce off with his ball then he really was the wrong man from the beginning.

[paul_e]

But there have been plenty of opportunities to fix the foundations. If the MON experience was all it took to make Lerner flounce off with his ball then he really was the wrong man from the beginning.

Of course there were and, as I said, we made subsequent mistakes, but at the heart of those mistakes has been the need to get the club into the black.  There's a fair argument that he should've been reigned in much sooner, but look at how people have talked about Lerner since he stopped throwing money at it and it's pretty clear that he'd have been given shit if he had given MON backing in that 3rd summer which would've been the right time to do something about it.

[Chinchilla Bathhouse]

I would argue (and have done) that the damage MON inflicted on Lerner's bank balance was less than the damage he inflicted on his head.  Randy was clearly mentally wounded by the way MON conducted himself at the end, having put so much trust in him only to have it booted back in his face with lawsuits to follow.  Obviously giving him that much trust and that much money was extremely foolish and it's easy to say that Randy should have been more hard-nosed and business-like about it all.  But as we can clearly see, Randy isn't much of a businessman; we have also seen that he's a sensitive soul, so being stung by a litigious little bastard like MON hurt him very deeply.  We've never really recovered from MON flouncing out.  He left behind a financial disaster, but with sound leadership we should have recovered from that by now.  His real legacy was a broken owner.

[glasses]

That article is a load of old cock.

I'll never criticise anyone for being pissed off with the way MON left.

I will say though that his effect surely had to end once we'd finished 9th the season after he did leave.

Let's look at the sticks people use to beat MON with.

Left us with no money?
Broke our record signing (double it nearly). Paid Nzogbia, Bent, Given, & increased Gabby to over 50k contracts. Rubbish.

Left us with a poor ageing squad with no sell on value?
Sold: 3 biggest. A Young, Downing, and Delph. 18m, 20m, and £8m so £46m in all, it's fair to say performed very well and contributed to the club after MON went and during his time. Others sold for fees. Davies £3.5m, Collins £2.0m, Luke Young £2.5m.
So over £50m recouped and I think all bar L. Young were under 30 when sold? Many others went for free. Dunne, Reo Coker etc. However, I see this as a problem the club have had for some time and have continued with since. Since MON, the only player we have bought who we have turned a profit on has been Benteke. It's not only players MON signed that seem to go for nothing. Given, Bent, Nzogbia, Makoun, Vlaar, Ireland. I can't beat MON with that stick either.

[tomd2103]

He's not wrong.  We spent the best part of £200m and a couple of years after he left we'd made about half of it back and had a squad that wasn't fit for purpose and that's not even touching on the crippling wage bill that he left.

There have been poor decisions since he left, McLeish and his signings of Hutton, Given and Nzogbia at the forefront of those, but we've been on shaky foundations for years and they were laid by MON.

MON leaving put the club into a tailspin from which it hasn't recovered.  It was recoverable, but subsequent poor decisions have landed us where we are now.  I think the real damage was done by letting Lambert stay on too long.  By the time he left, the club was heading only one way.

[supertom]

O Neill is a toss clown and the manner in which he left was shit but all I'll say in fairness to him is that he at least walked out as opposed to waiting around for the tin-tack I suppose. We've had managers since piss and moan about the cards they've been dealt when they were either in the job, or shortly after leaving. They seemed to want out but obviously waited until getting the bullet to collect their full compo package. Quite how O Neill end up with his hefty severance package having walked out of his job I don't know and I guess we'll never know the full story on that.

Still, this was 6 years ago almost.  O Neill isn't the reason we're going down. If we're gonna blame him we might as well blame Doug Ellis, or hell we might as well blame the four founders for even starting the club given that we'd ultimately lead to arguably the most numbingly shit season in our history some 150 odd years later.
No the fact is that Randy has overseen a terrible decline through naivety, mis-management, ignorance, through to plain dis-interest and everything in between. He signed off on O Neill's checks, and Houllier's, McLeish's and beyond. He spent 50 million in the summer and we're left with a squad of absolute drek. That comes down to several factors. Who he hires as manager. Everyone involved in our transfer process from Reilly to the scouts. The board he recruited post O Neill. From Faulkner to Fox and every lacky that went with them it was a failure. We've ripped it up and started again (and hopefully got it at least a bit right now).

Also as far as our ins and outs have gone, O Neill has probably had the most success in terms of recouping fees. At least he made a significant wedge with Young, Downing and Milner compared to what we paid for each. Since then we've made a significant wedge on Benteke and that's pretty much it. Delph only went for 8. Other than that we tend to haemorrhage players we've paid shitloads of wages for, for nothing. Look at Lambert's signings. We got rid of the vast majority of his second summer signings they were all so fucking disastrous. They may not be the financial hit that a Coker (who wasn't that bad to be fair) was, but to take so many players in and then bin them so soon after is ridiculous, whether you pay 1 mill or 8 mill for a player, and we're gonna see that this summer two. Most of last summers signings will go and probably would be put up for sale even had we survived. No we've gone from O Neill's mediocre transfer record to absolutely fucking shambolic transfer records.

[supertom]

I would argue (and have done) that the damage MON inflicted on Lerner's bank balance was less than the damage he inflicted on his head.  Randy was clearly mentally wounded by the way MON conducted himself at the end, having put so much trust in him only to have it booted back in his face with lawsuits to follow.  Obviously giving him that much trust and that much money was extremely foolish and it's easy to say that Randy should have been more hard-nosed and business-like about it all.  But as we can clearly see, Randy isn't much of a businessman; we have also seen that he's a sensitive soul, so being stung by a litigious little bastard like MON hurt him very deeply.  We've never really recovered from MON flouncing out.  He left behind a financial disaster, but with sound leadership we should have recovered from that by now.  His real legacy was a broken owner.

I don't think O Neill would have been adverse to tighter restrictions from the very beginning. Before us he'd never had a big transfer budget. He was given as many chips as he wanted for the table and granted pissed a lot of them away and lost us a lot of money, but had Randy put a decent set up in place from the beginning we may have reigned in O Neill and either got more out of him, or perhaps seen him walk in better circumstances if he felt he couldn't work under that. Randy basically left O Neill to run the club, almost top to bottom it seemed. Which was a huge error.

But not turning things around in 6 years is incompetence of the highest order. And the fact is we still have a shockingly high wage bill in the top flight.

[Villa in Denmark]

It's really pretty simple.

MON isn't directly to blame for the last 5 years, but his walking out exposed how badly run we were, both from the managing of the finances from day 1 and the total lack of other footballing knowledge around the club at the time.  The last bit was apparently the price for having MON as manager as he wouldn't accept any other football influence around the club.

The missed opportunity lay at the point of replacing Houllier with McLeish, not because of where he came from, not even because of his "style" of football, but because we just carried on repeating the mistakes of the past of overly long contracts on way too much money for players who were not top drawer, which from a business perspective is a disgrace.