It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to be the Prophet of Doom
But putting aside emotion & blind loyalty to the club that we all love, you've only got to have a cursory examination of the stats & facts to realise we've reached a crossroads and got to make a big decision.
As we all know, we really REALLY are in the brown stuff so what do we do about it??
Like most things in life, I don't believe there's a simple one reasons why we are wallowing in the brown stuff.....the reasons are many and tangled and there's more than Houllier to blame for this.
To be fair, it's not solely GH's fault though he has made life amazingly difficult for himself, the team and us suffering supporters.
Yes there have been crazy numbers of injuries, yes O'Neill's selfish last-minute walk-out was appallingly timed & yes Lerner has (in 2010) kept his purse strings tightly held (& who can really blame him in a way when you examine how many of MON's signings were left twiddling thumbs instead of playing football).....
The sad fact of the matter is that we are nosediving RAPIDO under GH's "leadership" right now.
The "nosediving under Houllier" thing is not a personal rant or opinion but a matter of fact.
It's now obvious to most people GH has LOST his players as well as the fans & unless there is a HUGE change of fortunes then we are indeed going to be hard-pressed to escape being relegated to the Championship along with Wolves & possibly one of a pack of others that includes the Blues or maybe Wigan or West Ham or maybe the Baggies or maybe Blackburn....it's too early to say who will go down but certainly we are in that group of "favourites" for the drop.
I know it's a mega tight league and a couple of wins will see us leap-frog many clubs but I don't think there are many Villa fans right now who can foresee where the next goal is coming from, let alone victory.
There has to be a pro-active change by the Vlla hierarchy and we can't afford to get the next month or so wrong like we have done up til now this season.
Personally I think we will know more after the FA Cup and Sunderland games because lose those and the writing is written on the wall in huge letters.
I've not been one to advocate sacking managers recklessly or prematurely but we are living in bleak times....there is a depressing
deja vu feel to all of this, a mood that we are almost being dragged along screaming by fate and so we have to arrest that and fast.
For those of us old enough to have seen and felt the pain of relegation, you will know what I mean.
Something has GOT TO GIVE.
Lerner either has to back Houllier & give him silly money in January to TRY & get new players which I think we all accept is extremely unlikely.
(& let's be honest what decent player worth his salt will want to come & struggle with us in a sticky relegation fight now as we are clearly a football club that is in the midst of a tornado of bad feeling and uncertainty?)
OR Randy has to sack GH fairly quickly and bring in someone more suitable if that's possible & like most decisions in football, whatever you do is always going to be a gamble.
In my opinion we have to motivate & better organise the players we already have and to somehow remind them what it's like to have desire, fight, passion and to WIN games.
The transfer window will not rescue us. A lot of you have already said so & I agree.
No option is easy for Villa now & if we are all honest none of us know what the right answer is actually because whatever we do is a lottery.
But it increasingly SEEMS to me that we may need a new manager.
The wrong answer for Villa is to do nothing whatsoever (like giving the players days off and hope things turn from dark, black clouds to all things bright & beautiful).
Massively worrying times.
