I back McLeish 100% , and results willing and people keeping off his back, I back him long term for us to move forward.
From the outset, we had the ridiculous spectacle of `fans` wanting him sacked before he had even signed a contract and done a single days work on our behalf. All because of a stupid misguided tribalism, where some people are more concerned about rivalries with another club who should be irrelevant to us instead of what is best for the long term health of Aston Villa.
Of course now what most of the anti - Mcleish crowd say is it not his former connections but his defensive minded tactics and poor managerial ability the reasons they cannot back him. Nothing to do with him having been employed by Birmingham City. What complete bullshit !
All managers live and die by results, but dont tell me that if any other candidate for the job had been appointed and they had exactly the same set of results and performances with the same resources they would be suffering the same level of antipathy and calls for their removal.
What I see is someone with strength of character and confidence in their own ability conducting themselves with integrity in the face of unjustified abuse. Those are the sort of people I want working in our club - professionals with integrity.
Those who are so anti - Mcleish, just be honest, you wont give him a more of a chance because you think of him as a bluenose. But no you wont do that because from day one you didnt want him and barring an absolutely miraculous set of results you were going to find every other reason under the sun to justify why he shouldnt be given a chance to do good for us.
Erm, no.
I'm one of his biggest critics and I really couldn't care less who we got him from. The issue was he was a manager who got a team relegated. They stuck with him and he completely rebuild the squad (on similar funds to what many believe he can expect to see here) only to see them get relegated again having scored barely more than a goal a game for his entire time at the club.
He is then sending emails saying he's not defensive as if by telling us he wants to play exciting football we're suddenly going to forgive the fact that we're the worst side to watch in the league.
Regarding players the point I was trying to make is that, at some point in their career a manager has made most of this squad play at a pretty high standard. To have so many of them woefully short of confidence at the same time has got to be a consequence of poor management and coaching. If you don't think this is something the coaches and manager should be working to resolve then we might as well get rid of the lot of them and let the team manage itself because the only point of coaching is to make sure the players can give their best on a saturday afternoon.
I don't mind the league position, I was very positive towards Houllier right until the end because I could see a pattern to what he was trying to achieve and a determination to remove from the squad the players that were disrupting his efforts to do make a success of it.
Even with MON I could see what he was trying to achieve and how he wanted the team to play, that he left us in the shit with players on big long contracts that no one else wants means he's rightly going to get a lot of abuse but at least there was a style about the way he was going.
The only plan I can determine for McLeish is that he wants to keep things tight early on so we have a back 4 that stay in a line regardless of whether we have the ball or not. We then have a midfield sitting in their positions and not really going looking for the ball, etc. After about 30minutes the word goes out that the players can start to express themselves and we see a little more movement, but often by this point the other team is so on top and has so much possession that we don't seem to be able to get a foot on the ball before half time. In the 2nd half we then come out and look ok most weeks but then someone makes a mistake and everything falls apart. McLeish sees this and starts acting all offended on the touchline but does nothing to change things until about 70mins where he makes the most predictable sub imaginable and nothing changes then he'll make another sub or 2 at about 80-85minutes when it's far too late for those players to do anything.
I think the bigger issue i have though is that we have players like Bannan, Fonz, Gardner (and Clark and Albrighton until recently) who need time on the pitch to show if they can be valued members of the squad or not but he's so scared to change things that none of them is getting any decent time on the pitch. When injuries forced him to pick Clark and Albrighton they came into the side and have proven they deserve to be considered full members of the squad so the talent is there.
I can accept a transition season if you can see the manager is getting a measure of all the options he has and is forming a plan of what he's going to do to make next season better but he's not doing that in my opinion. He shipped out a defensive midfielder without ever seeing him play a game and we've had a glaring hole in defensive midfield all season, surely trying Makoun in that role should've been something we looked at.
The list of things to count against him purely on what he's done since he arrived at the club far outweighs the positives. It's all well and good to say he needs time to get his own players in and build his own squad but if he gets us relegated by doing that we're going to be left in the championship with a squadful of journeymen like the blues are now. He has to earn the right to the time to rebuild the squad and on current performance he hasn't earned that right. If things improve towards the end of the season and we start to see signs that he's getting the team playing a style he wants then I'll change my opinion but what has happened so far doesn't suggest that is the case.