Having grown up listening to endless anecdotes relating to the glory years of the 70's and how inspirational the Holte has always been, one can only wonder what was on the minds of the Villa 'faithful' yesterday as the events unfolded at VP.
I wholeheartedly embrace the supporter’s right to criticise and voice their disaffection at the pallid, ineffectual performance of our highly paid team but does voicing this disapproval before or during the game help? We played against a team of predominantly cheap, run of the mill players on wages comparable to our youngsters who comfortably did a job on us! A job as directed by their management’s tactics and ably supported by the negative atmosphere created by a vociferous minority of malcontents on the much lauded former terrace. If they are unhappy with Houllier, and even I, as a supporter of his, offer no defence to yesterday’s tacticless debacle, then surely they should express that discontent after the game when it has no affect on the performance?
When you consider the teams we are playing in the run in and their recent experience of relegation battles I fear our disunity will be our greatest Achilles heel. Blues, West Ham, Albion, Wolves and Wigan have all been here before and do we really expect the Blackburn and Blackpool fans to turn on their clubs / teams / managers as we did yesterday? Should we not leave the post mortem to the end of the season? The Chairman played his hand in January and I don’t see what other options we have until we know the outcome of this traumatic campaign.
We told D O'L we weren’t fickle. I am beginning to wonder!
