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

[brian green]

What I see as the reason for our decline is touched on in part in the immediately preceding posts.
Randy Lerner was visibly wounded by MON's departure, especially the manner and timing of it. Didn't he actually once say he would cling to O'Neill's legs to stop him leaving or words to that effect?  Eventually Randy's pain subsided but by the time he intervened personally to bring in McLeish he and the club had crossed a very big Rubicon.  Top table ambition had been replaced by Premiership stability and security.  Expressed simplistically we went from playing to win to playing not to lose.  Randy Lerner personally liked Alex McLeish and Paul Lambert and they both liked him.  Both took it as their bounden duty to him to protect his investment.  Both were yes men and both failed miserably.
During the time of McLeish and Lambert an active policy of lowering expectations was pursued as the assumed requirements of the owner.  Lower expectations, cheaper players, lower running costs.
This was only ever going one place.  The place where we are now with our ambitions, as I never tire of saying, to be as good as West Bromwich Albion.
Lerner was like a man with a lot of money going to the races.  He plunged on the first race, lost most of his gambling money then spent the rest of the afternoon betting in smaller sums on long shots to get as much back as he could of what he came in with.
As has often been said in these pages, the worst thing about our fall has been the inevitability and predictability of it.

[brontebilly]

As much as I was / am in the anti-O'Neill camp, it's a bit rich for him to be telling the fans to move on after spending the first half of the article slagging off a manager who left almost 6 years ago.

True, its time we forgot about MON.

Pulis left Palace in similar circumstances but they didnt crumble and fall out of the league.

They also made a joke appointment in Warnock that they still rectified quite quickly without falling apart.

nearly six years on from MON, we have players blatantly not giving their all on the pitch, uninterested management and what was until recently anyway a board full of idiot Lerner sycophants.

another one that sticks in the craw, our homegrown "stars" are the ones you would hope would be giving their all until the last minute. We have a fat disgrace as captain and the boy wonder clown who has delivered nothing on the pitch all season.

Thats why I think its more than a case of getting rid of a few odious characters in the dressing room, the club appears rotten to its core at the moment and its going to take serious surgery to get it back on track.

[paul_e]

As much as I was / am in the anti-O'Neill camp, it's a bit rich for him to be telling the fans to move on after spending the first half of the article slagging off a manager who left almost 6 years ago.

True, its time we forgot about MON.

Pulis left Palace in similar circumstances but they didnt crumble and fall out of the league.

They also made a joke appointment in Warnock that they still rectified quite quickly without falling apart.

nearly six years on from MON, we have players blatantly not giving their all on the pitch, uninterested management and what was until recently anyway a board full of idiot Lerner sycophants.

another one that sticks in the craw, our homegrown "stars" are the ones you would hope would be giving their all until the last minute. We have a fat disgrace as captain and the boy wonder clown who has delivered nothing on the pitch all season.

Thats why I think its more than a case of getting rid of a few odious characters in the dressing room, the club appears rotten to its core at the moment and its going to take serious surgery to get it back on track.

Pulis was Palace manager for 29 games and had 1 transfer window with them so the squad after he left wasn't his.

When Mon left after 4 seasons we had a squad built entirely to play his way with no one at the club with any football knowledge to help transition us to a new style so when we went for a different type of manager the squad didn't accept him and we had a season of struggle before a late surge to finish 9th.

The board panicked and appointed someone they saw as better suited to work with Mon's squad but that failed.

Next they found someone who'd worked with unknowns from the lower leagues and got some success and asked him to replicate it becuase that way we could replenish the squad quite cheaply.

The 1 major success that season was a largely unknown foreign import so they bought a load more but we got worse so they decided to go back to  mon style appointments and go for aging experienced premier league players.

When that failed as well they went for someone who could be a mon-like motivator and it worked for 2 months before his complete lack of tactical understanding or planning saw us nosedive to the bottom of the league.

Garde was another big change in direction but by the time he arrived it was too late to turn things around so his involvement in the whole thing is very minor.

From that whole timeline the key thing is that we were constantly trying to find a way to stabilise things but the lack of experience on the board meant that the decision making was poor.  Mon's involvement was:
1. spending a lot of money and leaving us needing, a year after he left, to stabilise and rebuild which started the cycle of bad decisions.
2. not working with the board to build a back office structure suited to a premier league club (and pushing out anyone who tried to do it).

This isn't ignoring the faults of others it's just understanding that the first ripples in the club falling apart were set in motion by MON and not because of the timing of his departure but because if what he's done in the 2 years before that.  His first 2 years were fine and he deserves credit for them (even if it does include signing Harewood) but that third summer (and January) was terrible:
                           
Curtis Davies   £8m - £3.5m (-4.5)
Steve Sidwell   £5m - pretty much nothing (-5)     
Brad Friedel   £2.5m - free (-2.5)
Nicky Shorey   £4m -  £1.5m (-2.5)       
Luke Young   £5m - £2.5m (-2.5)       
Carlos Cuellar   £7.8m - nothing (-7.                
James Milner   £12m - £26m (+14)               
Brad Guzan   £600k - ?
Emile Heskey   £3.5m - nothing (-3.5)

Milner and Friedel were decent signings (and Guzan was ok for the cost as a backup even if he's become a liability in the last 18months) the rest of those are a shocking waste of money; we lost £14.3m on them, paid most of them huge wages compared to their ability, and got very little to show for it on the pitch with all of that expense gaining us 2 points.  Letting him repeated the trick a year later made it even worse.

[brontebilly]

As much as I was / am in the anti-O'Neill camp, it's a bit rich for him to be telling the fans to move on after spending the first half of the article slagging off a manager who left almost 6 years ago.

True, its time we forgot about MON.

Pulis left Palace in similar circumstances but they didnt crumble and fall out of the league.

They also made a joke appointment in Warnock that they still rectified quite quickly without falling apart.

nearly six years on from MON, we have players blatantly not giving their all on the pitch, uninterested management and what was until recently anyway a board full of idiot Lerner sycophants.

another one that sticks in the craw, our homegrown "stars" are the ones you would hope would be giving their all until the last minute. We have a fat disgrace as captain and the boy wonder clown who has delivered nothing on the pitch all season.

Thats why I think its more than a case of getting rid of a few odious characters in the dressing room, the club appears rotten to its core at the moment and its going to take serious surgery to get it back on track.

Pulis was Palace manager for 29 games and had 1 transfer window with them so the squad after he left wasn't his.

When Mon left after 4 seasons we had a squad built entirely to play his way with no one at the club with any football knowledge to help transition us to a new style so when we went for a different type of manager the squad didn't accept him and we had a season of struggle before a late surge to finish 9th.

The board panicked and appointed someone they saw as better suited to work with Mon's squad but that failed.

Next they found someone who'd worked with unknowns from the lower leagues and got some success and asked him to replicate it becuase that way we could replenish the squad quite cheaply.

The 1 major success that season was a largely unknown foreign import so they bought a load more but we got worse so they decided to go back to  mon style appointments and go for aging experienced premier league players.

When that failed as well they went for someone who could be a mon-like motivator and it worked for 2 months before his complete lack of tactical understanding or planning saw us nosedive to the bottom of the league.

Garde was another big change in direction but by the time he arrived it was too late to turn things around so his involvement in the whole thing is very minor.

From that whole timeline the key thing is that we were constantly trying to find a way to stabilise things but the lack of experience on the board meant that the decision making was poor.  Mon's involvement was:
1. spending a lot of money and leaving us needing, a year after he left, to stabilise and rebuild which started the cycle of bad decisions.
2. not working with the board to build a back office structure suited to a premier league club (and pushing out anyone who tried to do it).

This isn't ignoring the faults of others it's just understanding that the first ripples in the club falling apart were set in motion by MON and not because of the timing of his departure but because if what he's done in the 2 years before that.  His first 2 years were fine and he deserves credit for them (even if it does include signing Harewood) but that third summer (and January) was terrible:
                           
Curtis Davies   £8m - £3.5m (-4.5)
Steve Sidwell   £5m - pretty much nothing (-5)     
Brad Friedel   £2.5m - free (-2.5)
Nicky Shorey   £4m -  £1.5m (-2.5)       
Luke Young   £5m - £2.5m (-2.5)       
Carlos Cuellar   £7.8m - nothing (-7.                
James Milner   £12m - £26m (+14)               
Brad Guzan   £600k - ?
Emile Heskey   £3.5m - nothing (-3.5)

Milner and Friedel were decent signings (and Guzan was ok for the cost as a backup even if he's become a liability in the last 18months) the rest of those are a shocking waste of money; we lost £14.3m on them, paid most of them huge wages compared to their ability, and got very little to show for it on the pitch with all of that expense gaining us 2 points.  Letting him repeated the trick a year later made it even worse.

Not sure that MON would be at fault for 1 or 2 really, its back to the O'Leary/Risdale argument for Leeds too. Primary responsibility for ensuring the club was being run is a sustainable manner financially was Randy Lerner.  He utter failed then and continues to today.

MON made a series of bizarre and unnecessary signings that a stronger chairman would never have allowed. Some players just dont work out but there was no logic to signing Beye, Shorey, Warnock, multiple centre halves, Harewood and of course Emile Ivanhoe Heskey. His summer 2010 business should have been strongly challenged by the board i.e. if he wanted to sign Warnock then Shorey needed to go first, if he wanted Collins then Davies or Cuellar needed to go first. It probably would have seen MON walk out a season earlier than he did but after blowing a CL place, the board were in a strong position to challenge him then.

But even despite Milner being sold, Houllier was left a very decent side, adding Makoun, Walker and Bent, that he was dragging down to the second division until Gary Mac came in. The revisionism on here towards Houllier still astounds me.

McLeish to be fair was very much managing in austerity mode, Hutton, Given and Zog only replaced the likes of L Young, Friedel, Downing, A Young, Carew, Reo Coker. McLeish never had a chance really, thought he looked certain of a safe PL position until bad injuries to Dunne, Petrov and Bent meant we fell over the line.

Lambert was incredibly badly advised to take the Villa job, miles out of his depth but young managers like players need strong support structures to thrive. Sherwood, a shot in the dark to stave off relegation a year early. Was always going to end badly. Garde without board support was a dead man walking, another one who should have ran a mile from the job.

All managers since MON have been really poor but the common denominator is a pathetic excuse of a board running AVFC.

[paul_e]

but that's the point, we know that as soon as mon was told he had to act sensibly he flounced off.  Maybe he'd threatened to do that the summer before and they relented and let him spend, that's the key, everyone says the chairman needed to control his spending better but that probably would've led to him walking away sooner and I can't imagine the fans would've been supportive of Lerner if that had happened given that a fair number turned on him almost immediately when the rumours of 'sell to buy' started late in mons final season.

[DaveD]

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.

Yeah. Completely ruined my 40th birthday.

[Monty]

The responsibility for our relegation lies with Lerner, but MON deserves most of the blame for our failure to make the Champions League and build from there. Randy gave him fucktons of money in those days, and while our rivals spent it on Vincent Kompany and Andrei Arshavin (when he was good), MON spent it on Emile Heskey, Nigel Reo-Coker, Curtis Davies, Steve Sidwell, Carlos Cuellar etc. Fuck him.

[DaveD]

The responsibility for our relegation lies with Lerner, but MON deserves most of the blame for our failure to make the Champions League and build from there. Randy gave him fucktons of money in those days, and while our rivals spent it on Vincent Kompany and Andrei Arshavin (when he was good), MON spent it on Emile Heskey, Nigel Reo-Coker, Curtis Davies, Steve Sidwell, Carlos Cuellar etc. Fuck him.

Was that metric or imperial fucktons ?

[Monty]

Metric. Imperial is a fucktonne.

[DaveD]

Metric. Imperial is a fucktonne.

Bah. Bloody modern EU nonsense. Bring back the fucktonne !

[Dave]

Randy gave him fucktons of money in those days, and while our rivals spent it on Vincent Kompany and Andrei Arshavin (when he was good), MON spent it on Emile Heskey, Nigel Reo-Coker, Curtis Davies, Steve Sidwell, Carlos Cuellar etc. Fuck him.

Kompany joined Man City for £6m,ten days after O'Neill signed Cuellar for £8m.

Sigh.

[Rigadon]

I bet they were paying him a fuckton more in wages

[Monty]

I bet they were paying him a fuckton more in wages

Actually they bought Kompany before the takeover. It might have been more than we were paying Cuellar, but it's unlikely to have been more than we could have paid him.

[dave.woodhall]

Much as I hate O'Neill for his walkout, I can't blame him for what went on more than a couple of years after he left. By then we should have been on the road to recovery and even if the finances were knackered what money there was available should have been used better.

[Monty]

Much as I hate O'Neill for his walkout, I can't blame him for what went on more than a couple of years after he left. By then we should have been on the road to recovery and even if the finances were knackered what money there was available should have been used better.

For sure, that's spot on. However, I think O'Neill deserves a lot of blame for wasting our best chance at breaking into the top tier for a generation.