Managing the club was like being on death row says Paul Lambert

[Risso]

What a sad, bitter little man. The worst manager in my time supporting Villa, and that includes McNeill.  He didn't have a clue the mumbling oaf, and lurched from one dismal record to another. Good riddance, I can't see him 'gracing' the Premier League again any time soon, the hapless twat.

[brian green]

Back in the day Leeg it would have to be the Inner Circle 8 because it went past The Sty.  Don't even know if Brum has buses any more let alone the Inner Circle 8.

[Dave Cooper please]

It just didn't work. We now seem to have someone who knows what he's doing. Time to move on.

We have.  He hasn't.

And to continue the analogy Paul, we really should have flicked the switch sooner.  We'd all have got a buzz out of that.

Let's get this straight.

1.) You took over from McLeish, which instantly guaranteed you almost infinite goodwill.
2.) You signed the contract knowing the financial situation.
3.) You had free reign to shape the squad how you wanted within the financial constraints you'd already accepted.
4.) You repeatedly talked about how good a relationship you had with Lerner.

With that backdrop
1.) Over  2˝ years, you delivered almost a full house of negative records (I know there are 2 you didn't manage but I really don't want to look up which) not to mention humiliation on humiliation, yet still retained unbelievable levels of support from the crowd.
2.) Regressed the football on the pitch to a point where you'd made McLeish's side look like Brazil of 1982.
3.) Signed a new contract for 4 more years of this purgatory.
4.) When you saw which way the wind was blowing started with the digs at the crowd.
5.) Were either party to, or allowed a bullying culture at Bodymore Heath, that was so bad your two mates achieved the impossible and were actually sacked.
6.) Were so lost without them that you first recruited Keane as your assistant and then when he couldn't be arsed any more/had finished promoting his book went through the rest of your tenure with no assistant and no obvious signs of coaching in the team.

Then when the inevitable finally happened you

1.) Stood by as your successor beat your record for the season to date in 50% fewer games using the same players.
Jealous much?

2.) Started gobbing off to your mates in the press about how hard it had all been.
You could always have resigned if it was that shit.  You'd probably have a got a couple of million out of a tribunal.  Ask you mate, the manager that's the expert in litigation.

3.) Now your talking about it being like living on Death Row.
Before we get on to anything else, that's f¤¤king distasteful.
You must have been the only person that lived thinking that you were going to get the bullet, because to the rest of the footballing world you looked bullet proof and it was a genuine shock when you went.  And again you can't complain. You were given chance after chance to prove that the odd high point was something to build on and not a fluke.  Every time you threw it away.

Now be a good boy, crawl back under your rock and shut the f##k up.

Don't normally like to requote a lengthy post, but this is spot on/

[pauliewalnuts]

Agreed, absolutely spot on.

Lambert is right in that he had limited funds. The problem with that, though, is that what he managed to deliver was way, way off being acceptable even given that limited spending power.

It wasn't just awful in terms of league performance, it was so offensively horrible to watch that even the national press got in on the act.

I thought the McLeish season was horrendously depressing but - and this is being kind to Lambert - the second and third Lambert year (ie not so much the first) were way, way worse.

[ciggiesnbeer]

McLeish can claim to have had far greater limits placed on him than Lambert.

[tomd2103]

Some strange comments from Lambert there. Everyone knows there was a lack of investment in his tenure, but most factored that in when judging his first two seasons at the club. Because that was the only reason there wasn't a clear-cut case for sacking him after two years. It was only in the third season that it was completely obvious that it wasn't going to work out. I guess the main problem was that without his sidekicks he didn't have that much about him.

If the truth be told, he was lucky not to be sacked after the Millwall and Bradford defeats in his first season.  Yes, the team picked up towards the end of the season, but that week was one of the darkest I have experienced in my 30 years following Villa and not many other clubs would have kept the manager on in that situation.  The Bradford debacle in particular still hurts.

[The Left Side]

Anyone know how much TSM2 got to spend in his tenure as Villa manager?

[ciggiesnbeer]

Anyone know how much TSM2 got to spend in his tenure as Villa manager?

About 55-60M quid if this site is anywhere near accurate.

http://www.transferleague.co.uk/aston-villa/english-football-teams/aston-villa-transfer

[Brend'Watkins]

Some strange comments from Lambert there. Everyone knows there was a lack of investment in his tenure, but most factored that in when judging his first two seasons at the club. Because that was the only reason there wasn't a clear-cut case for sacking him after two years. It was only in the third season that it was completely obvious that it wasn't going to work out. I guess the main problem was that without his sidekicks he didn't have that much about him.

If the truth be told, he was lucky not to be sacked after the Millwall and Bradford defeats in his first season.  Yes, the team picked up towards the end of the season, but that week was one of the darkest I have experienced in my 30 years following Villa and not many other clubs would have kept the manager on in that situation.  The Bradford debacle in particular still hurts.

The Chelsea drubbing would have been it for me.  Was that the start of the (his) list of new records for Aston Villa.

[AV82EC]

Some strange comments from Lambert there. Everyone knows there was a lack of investment in his tenure, but most factored that in when judging his first two seasons at the club. Because that was the only reason there wasn't a clear-cut case for sacking him after two years. It was only in the third season that it was completely obvious that it wasn't going to work out. I guess the main problem was that without his sidekicks he didn't have that much about him.

If the truth be told, he was lucky not to be sacked after the Millwall and Bradford defeats in his first season.  Yes, the team picked up towards the end of the season, but that week was one of the darkest I have experienced in my 30 years following Villa and not many other clubs would have kept the manager on in that situation.  The Bradford debacle in particular still hurts.

The Chelsea drubbing would have been it for me.  Was that the start of the (his) list of new records for Aston Villa.

That was when the whole thing turned. We'd beaten Liverpool 3-1 the week before with a fantastic performance but that 8-0 followed by the Spurs/Wigan home drubbings swiftly followed by Bradford/Millwall led most of us to realise something wasn't quite right. We picked up at the dnd of the season but years 2 and 3 just got worse and worse.....

[pauliewalnuts]

I thought year one was very promising. I know there were people who had seen enough after that year to want him out - and I actually understand entirely their line of thinking, even if I disagreed with it - but for me, we had seen sufficient glimpses of something promising to think he was building something.

IIRC he had pretty much 70% support on here at that point, didn't he? Whatever the figure, Villa fans in general seemed to be behind him.

Season two was like a nine month long sinking feeling where it looked more and more like we were getting worse.

Season three was just horrific. We had that opening decent spell - and even that wasn't really that decent, including as it did getting dispatched from the league cup by Orient, at home, and a no-shots-on-goal yawn fest at home to Newcastle - but then it was just horror show after horror show.

I genuinely can't remember the vast majority of the unwanted records we broke, there were just so many of them. To have had that absurd situation with Karsa and Culverhouse and then the Roy Keane farce, then Lambert on his own, as we became a national joke due to our non-scoring was really horrific to watch. It was just so depressing.

I am not old enough to remember the descent to the third division, but I remember the 86-7  relegation season in great detail, and most of last season looked just like that.

It was just horrible - grim, austere, unrelentingly depressing, drab, like having a constant stomach ache for seven months.

In a way, I don't blame Lambert making his case, he's got to find a job somewhere if he wants to keep himself busy, and at the time, I never bought into that whole "OMG! He mumbles! And he's thick!" line of attack which struck me as petty and irrelevant, but when I think about him now, my head just gets filled with memories of his shell shocked, ashen face as he walked along the front of the lower Trinity after having our arses handed to us by some no-mark club like Crystal Palace yet again.

It wasn't just bad to watch, it was spirit-sappingly depressing.

I'll be honest, I am still far from convinced by Sherwood, but he starts with a gigantic chunk of credit in the bank purely on the basis that he at least manages to make the club seem alive, ambitious, watchable again rather than the morgue-like experience of the later Lambert period.

Thank god that is over.

[pauliewalnuts]

We'd beaten Liverpool 3-1 the week before with a fantastic performance but that 8-0 followed by the Spurs/Wigan home drubbings swiftly followed by Bradford/Millwall led most of us to realise something wasn't quite right.

That was his major failing in a nutshell.

There were times when we'd pull out of the hat a marvellous performance and result. Any other manager would have used that as a platform to build on. Doesn't mean you'd automatically go out and sweep aside all your following opponents, just use it to spur on something promising.

With Lambert pretty much every one of those matches was followed by a catastrophic spell.

[SashasGrandad]

If managing was like being on death row

Watching it was like being tortured - a combination of water boarding and being beaten on the soles of your feet while biting ants were stuffed in your underpants - with Max Bygraves singing "pink toothbrush" being played at full volume ..............

[RussellC]

For all of Lambert's faults, the one that really annoyed me was his omission to put a proper coaching-team in place. Whether this was be design or just negligence I do not know, and I would also lay some of the blame with his superiors for allowing it, but we were a complete shambles after the Karsa and Culverhouse fiasco and Lambert has to take responsibility for not adequately addressing the problem.

I hold my hands up to the fact that I was (albeit cautiously) optimistic about Keane coming-in, as I thought he'd install a much needed 'winning mentality' in the players, but as 'a friend' surely Lambert would have asked for some assurances that Keane wouldn't up-and-leave at the first sign of difficulty that he did.

On pretty much every level Lambert failed as the Manager of Aston Villa. He'd do as well to recognise his own failings rather than look for excuses if he seriously wants to resurrect his career.

[Jimbo]

I thought year one was very promising. I know there were people who had seen enough after that year to want him out - and I actually understand entirely their line of thinking, even if I disagreed with it - but for me, we had seen sufficient glimpses of something promising to think he was building something.

IIRC he had pretty much 70% support on here at that point, didn't he? Whatever the figure, Villa fans in general seemed to be behind him.

Season two was like a nine month long sinking feeling where it looked more and more like we were getting worse.

Season three was just horrific. We had that opening decent spell - and even that wasn't really that decent, including as it did getting dispatched from the league cup by Orient, at home, and a no-shots-on-goal yawn fest at home to Newcastle - but then it was just horror show after horror show.

I genuinely can't remember the vast majority of the unwanted records we broke, there were just so many of them. To have had that absurd situation with Karsa and Culverhouse and then the Roy Keane farce, then Lambert on his own, as we became a national joke due to our non-scoring was really horrific to watch. It was just so depressing.

I am not old enough to remember the descent to the third division, but I remember the 86-7  relegation season in great detail, and most of last season looked just like that.

It was just horrible - grim, austere, unrelentingly depressing, drab, like having a constant stomach ache for seven months.

In a way, I don't blame Lambert making his case, he's got to find a job somewhere if he wants to keep himself busy, and at the time, I never bought into that whole "OMG! He mumbles! And he's thick!" line of attack which struck me as petty and irrelevant, but when I think about him now, my head just gets filled with memories of his shell shocked, ashen face as he walked along the front of the lower Trinity after having our arses handed to us by some no-mark club like Crystal Palace yet again.

It wasn't just bad to watch, it was spirit-sappingly depressing.

I'll be honest, I am still far from convinced by Sherwood, but he starts with a gigantic chunk of credit in the bank purely on the basis that he at least manages to make the club seem alive, ambitious, watchable again rather than the morgue-like experience of the later Lambert period.

Thank god that is over.

I agree with most of what you say here, except the "mumbles/thick" line. I'm sorry, but he was frequently unintelligible and inarticulate. That's not a style faux pas; communication is a fundamental aspect of his job. If people from England struggle to understand him, how would someone from overseas deal with it? When I'm speaking to people from other countries as part of my job, I tone down my accent and make sure I can be understood. It's not that hard to do.

Then there's the question of intelligence. Remember his 'new style'? That groundbreaking revolution in possession football, wherein the players knock the ball around among themselves in their own half for a few minutes before launching it in the general direction of the opposition's half, and losing it?

Remember his genius tactical switch when we were getting dumped out the cup by Bradford at home: shove on every forward on the club's books and hope for the best?

Remember the bomb squad?

There's a reason why were were so incredibly, record-breakingly shit under Lambert, and a lack of support from Randy Lerner wasn't the main one.

Why do you think Villa will be safe?
"I just do."

The bloke was an arrogant idiot.