Gerard Houllier

[Clampy]

What could Houllier have done better?

Winning more than 5 league games and looking a bit more interested on the touchline would be a start.

I'm not sure if there is a correlation between the performance or results of a team and how emotional the manager is.

Point taken, but Mancini was bellowing out instructions whilst they were 4-0 up. Brian Little, Big Ron, John Gregory and MON never left the touchline and players responded. DOL stood leaning against the dug-out arms folded and we all know how bad he was.

[Clampy]

What could Houllier have done better?

Winning more than 5 league games and looking a bit more interested on the touchline would be a start.

Mick McCarthy leaps up and down on the touchline, but would you want him as your boss?

Maybe not for us, but he's got 2 teams promoted to the Premier and kept Wolves up last season, he's not done that badly.

[Chris Smith]

Is there something fundamentally wrong in our training set up that is causing these injuries, I wonder, or just bad luck? We were very lucky with injuries for a long time previously, maybe this is payback time.

When you take into account that our previous training regime consisted of MON chucking a load of balls at the players and telling them to get on with it whilst Robertson stood at the sidelines shouting ''stop bunching'' its hardly a surprise we've ended up with injuries.

Perhaps that's what we should be doing now because it made us win a lot of games. Or, perhaps, it's a load of bollocks that has become another of those interent truths.

Ahhh I see irony gets once more lost on the internet. The point is that no-one knows the true reasons for the injury list, just as no-one knows the truth behind supposed player unrest. There is but one truth and that is that our kids are doing a magnificent job whilst a number of senior players are not. If only one or two of those aforementioned senior players were to get their arses in gear the problem would be resolved and we'd once more be talking about 6th place.

Sorry, Neil. In my postprandial Christmas state unless it's got a big signpost alerting to me it then any attempt at subtlety will be lost.

[NeilH]

What could Houllier have done better?

Winning more than 5 league games and looking a bit more interested on the touchline would be a start.

Mick McCarthy leaps up and down on the touchline, but would you want him as your boss?

Maybe not for us, but he's got 2 teams promoted to the Premier and kept Wolves up last season, he's not done that badly.

Maybe so, but I'm struggling to see the connection between the animated touchline manager and success.
I would argue that there is a perception that if the manager is jumping up and down he cares, but if he stands calm and collected he is distant and does not care. I can see that it is easy to make the connection, I just don't believe that in reality it is so.

[JUAN PABLO]

Ive just watched the Villa/Manure game again.  We played some cracking football in that match,   beautiful at times... ;-) 

[Dribbler]

A somewhat cyclical argument, but the very fact that had MON not left when he had, Houllier wouldn't even have been considered for the job, shows that you can't pretend MON's departure had no effect.

Sorry, but when MON left none of us were considerign him for the job.  It's the way Randy wanted to go so fair enough, but if you jacked your job tomorrow and whoever replaced you was shite, would you accept you were partially to blame for a decision you had no hand in?  And with all the arguments about the timing of his departure, lets not forget that the club took their time in finding a new man and didn't jump into anything.

Martin left us in a much better state than we are in now, so what had happened since he's gone is simply not his fault.

Mmmm how can I put  this in a way you might understand.

If Father Christmas left his job on Christmas eve, it would be very difficult to replace him in time for the big event, and indeed the choice of stand in Father Christmas would be rather limited too. Whoever came in would find it difficult replacing such a pivotal figure at such a pivotal time even if the picture was rosy and the previous Father Christmas had left things in a great state. Unfortunately things weren't left in a great state, though maybe some that were blinded by the magic of Christmas and the faerie's  sparkle thought it was.

Now we've all had a bad Christmas because we didn't get the presents we wanted. The new Father Christmas hasn't exactly covered himself in glory, but he hasn't been helped by some of his helpers,  and some of his key sleigh pulling reindeer that were meant to help him deliver his presents to us deserving Villa fans, got themselves injured or have gone AWOL. We shouldn't be too harsh on him though, he came in when everything was in full flow and with the wheels just primed to come off the sleigh and he has had very little opportunity to gain any control as the wheels were already in motion. Given the time of his appointment he couldn't even get the mechanics in he wanted to try and fix everything that was wrong. The simple fact of the matter is that most of the causal chains that buggered up Christmas were put in motion long before Christmas and the ones that weren't were ones that the incumbent Father Christmas had no control over. Maybe if he'd had that little bit of magic dust everything would be much better now, though we would be blinded to the underlying reality by that dust,  but it's a rare commodity these days, and unfortunately he didn't seem to have it, or enough of it, to have a positive effect. It would be unfair however to blame him for not fixing the mess he inherited considering when he inherited it.

The moral of the story? It was MoN that killed Christmas.
 

[pmk1981]

I don't know how many times I have checked villa site and sky sports today in the hope that i see a story he has had the sack !!

[Legion]

I like that, Dribbler.

[Concrete John]

The moral of the story? It was MoN that killed Christmas.

An interesting analogy, and one I well understand, thank you very much, but where it falls down is that Santa has a one day to do his job, so anyone coming in on the eve is screwed.  Should the replacement Santa have 9 months to get all the kids their presents I'd expect a few more to have them by now.

[pauliewalnuts]

He left us with no points, and level in the table with everyone else. The season was about to start. No manager worth appointing and who was in a job would have joined us at that time. You cannot get around those facts.   

I like the way you drop that in as if it's a fact that they didn't approach people in jobs.

Also, I wonder how easy it is to quicky convince managers to leave their current club and join you five days before the start of the season.

I'm guessing the answer is "not very". It's the same thing we're seeing across this forum, people demanding we sack Houllier now, which is all well and good, but totally unable to face what happens when we do that - as in, what happens tomorrow? Who do we approach? Who do we get in? How long will it take?

While none of us know who we approached or how we approached them, what we can be sure of is that on current evidence we got the wrong man. 

Were it me, I would have made a big move for Jol and paid whatever compensation Ajax wanted.  he walked out a few months later, so things can't have been 100% right for him there and I think the lure of a club like Villa (6th place and a generous chairman) would havwe got him to jump ship.

Again, you don't know we didn't make a move for Jol, and it is one thing walking out of a club when things go badly, it is another entirely walking out before the start of the season. I'm not surprised he didn't fancy budging.

[pauliewalnuts]

A somewhat cyclical argument, but the very fact that had MON not left when he had, Houllier wouldn't even have been considered for the job, shows that you can't pretend MON's departure had no effect.

Sorry, but when MON left none of us were considerign him for the job.  It's the way Randy wanted to go so fair enough, but if you jacked your job tomorrow and whoever replaced you was shite, would you accept you were partially to blame for a decision you had no hand in?  And with all the arguments about the timing of his departure, lets not forget that the club took their time in finding a new man and didn't jump into anything.

Martin left us in a much better state than we are in now, so what had happened since he's gone is simply not his fault.

If i left my job at zero notice and my employer had to replace me quickly and from a very small pool of willing candidates, yes, it would be partly my fault. I wouldn't kill myself with guilt over it, and I am sure Martin won't be, but it would still be largely of my doing.

THe point about his departure timing is that we had a smaller choice of people to fish from, and that is one contributing factor to why we ended up with Houllier

If Martin had left at the start of the summer, or the end of the previous season, we'd have had far more time to get a replacement, and managers are more likely to be prepared to move at the end of a season than they are a handful of days before the start of the season. I don't see how anyone can not see that.

As for Martin having left us in a fine state, I think we're discovering now that things weren't quite so rosey.

I don't know what is most disappointing, the disarray he left us in or the apparent contempt with which he did it. All these posters saying "Houllier doesn't think anything of the club" - here's a question, how much do they think MON "felt" for the club when he ditched us with such dreadful timing?

[Concrete John]

Again, you don't know we didn't make a move for Jol, and it is one thing walking out of a club when things go badly, it is another entirely walking out before the start of the season. I'm not surprised he didn't fancy budging.

Once again it becomes a circular argument, but how do we know they did? 

The only thing I can think of that points towards it not happening is all the talk of waiting for applications we heard.  Now, there may have been movements aside from that, but Jol is not going to apply while still being manager of Ajax.  And wasn;t he at least interested when Fulham approached him during the summer?

Given the time they took I just find it hard to acceot Houllier was the best we could do.

[Legion]

I heard a comment a few days back that MO'N did what he did at the time he did it in order 'to protect brand O'Neill'.

[pauliewalnuts]

Again, you don't know we didn't make a move for Jol, and it is one thing walking out of a club when things go badly, it is another entirely walking out before the start of the season. I'm not surprised he didn't fancy budging.

Once again it becomes a circular argument, but how do we know they did? 

The only thing I can think of that points towards it not happening is all the talk of waiting for applications we heard.  Now, there may have been movements aside from that, but Jol is not going to apply while still being manager of Ajax.  And wasn;t he at least interested when Fulham approached him during the summer?

Given the time they took I just find it hard to acceot Houllier was the best we could do.

You're right, we don't know, but the point is that you originally said "I'd have gone for Jol" with the implication that the board didn't, you were the one who used it as part of your argument. If as you say, we don't know, why use their failure to do so as a stick to beat them with?

[pauliewalnuts]

I heard a comment a few days back that MO'N did what he did at the time he did it in order 'to protect brand O'Neill'.

I heard that, it was Tom Ross saying it.