Bruce Sacked at last (now official)

[Ger Regan]

I don't think it's totally off the walls to be able to both believe bruce was not up to the job as well as thinking that he deserved not to be verbally abused or ridiculed considering everything he went through over the past year or so. I don't think anyone has suggested he should have kept the job because of it.

[cheltenhamlion]

It is more a social media and sycophantic wankers in press dig from me than specifically aimed at anyone round here.

[ktvillan]

He did have a very tough year but his tactics and selections were all over the place well before his bad times struck.  As for "still giving everything to the club" I doubt that included getting out on the training pitch and doing some coaching.  Or researching the opposition.   I have sympathy for his personal situation but   ultimately I judged him on his football management and he wasn't up to it from day one. 

[cdward]

Only a few in the media are switched on and have got it right, Percy and Liam Rosenior are a couple who have called it spot on. All the others have spouted the usual shit; proper football man, promotion expert, too soon to sack him, because he's ex Blues the fans wanted him gone.

It isn't too soon, it's five months too late. The day after the play off final we should have said "thanks Steve but you failed your remit for the season" and he should have gone then. If we'd got a decent manager in in the summer I genuinely believe we'd be top two now. There's no guarantees in football but you couldn't have chosen an easier start and he's made a royal mess of it.

Yes Quinton 
Regards Rosenior he was fair and honest on his assessment and he knows Bruce and respects him.
Finding Rosenior to be a very decent pundit.
He was on the ball with his comments having watched matches and was well aware of the state of play and that was major underachievement.

Really was good hearing him yesterday when Minto was asking the questions .
What was also good was that Rosenior despite liking and knowing Bruce and playing under him he still spoke up and said it how it is .

Rosenior acknowledge the size of villa and the fans and the rightful expectations and that a manager should have to deal with those expectations when you're at a club size of villa.

He said how 22/24 managers would want that squad and that the budget and squad are the best and are essentially underachieving - in relation to being only few points of play offs - it's still underachieving. Where as everyone else just says 2 points of play offs

yeah, yeah, but what did he say about the cabbage?

[Brassneck]

I can only go on what i heard personally and I certainly didn’t hear any references to his parents. I would hope that even the most stupid among our fans are not capable of being that reprehensible.

I think this whole thing is getting out of hand.  Crowd unrest should not be mixed up with abuse.

[Pat McMahon]

Jose Mourinho has won the Champions League twice, 8 league titles in 4 different countries and numerous domestic cups.  How dare Manchester United even think about getting rid of him.  Said no half arsed journalist or two bit pundit this week.

I have been drawing this parallel to anybody who will listen to me, including the Polish bloke in the coffee shop near our office who knows nothing about us other than the fact John Terry played for us last season.

[Pat McMahon]

I don't think it's totally off the walls to be able to both believe bruce was not up to the job as well as thinking that he deserved not to be verbally abused or ridiculed considering everything he went through over the past year or so. I don't think anyone has suggested he should have kept the job because of it.

I’m with you on this Ger.

[Sexual Ealing]

From Twitter:

More
At some point this season Gary Rowett will get the sack from Stoke and 100% Bruce will be all over that:-

Championship club ✅
Midlands based ✅
Large transfer kitty ✅
Blues negative football ✅
Dinosaur tactics ✅

They’ll love him up there

Rings true to me!

[Drummond]

Jose Mourinho has won the Champions League twice, 8 league titles in 4 different countries and numerous domestic cups.  How dare Manchester United even think about getting rid of him.  Said no half arsed journalist or two bit pundit this week.

I have been drawing this parallel to anybody who will listen to me, including the Polish bloke in the coffee shop near our office who knows nothing about us other than the fact John Terry played for us last season.

I said it earlier in another thread. The likes of Redknapp always available for a quote so left right alone. Mourinho who courts controversy and tells people what he thinks is then picked on.

Bruce's friends and mates still putting a spin on things.

[kippaxvilla2]

From a website called ninety minutes online.  Hard to argue with any of this and what a prick Kirkland is.

Why Aston Villa were right to sack Steve Bruce

October 4, 2018
After almost two years at the helm, Steve Bruce has been dismissed as Aston Villa manager.

He leaves the Midlanders floundering in the Championship with just one win in 10 matches across all competitions, despite having reached the play-off final in 2017-18, with under-23 coach Kevin MacDonald stepping in on a temporary basis.

A 3-3 home draw with bottom-of-the-table Preston North End, in which a fan bizarrely threw a cabbage at the former Hull City coach, proved the final straw, but in truth the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Whilst some in the media and a select few of the Villa Park faithful remain loyal to the 57-year-old, the majority of Holte End regulars are in agreement with the decision.

Here are five reasons why the parting of the ways is the right call:

Quality of football

The most pressing issue that most fans had with Bruce was the style of play he employed during his time in the dugout.

Despite managing over 100 games in claret and blue, there was little in the way of improvement on that front during his tenure.

It’s not necessarily that Villa were a long-ball team under his watch, but that there seemed to be no discernible structure in place, players distributing with a lack of urgency and often ending up simply passing across the field in front of the opponent’s defence.

That is despite having what most would agree is one of, if not the strongest squad in the Championship.

Bruce seemed to be reliant on moments of magic from the quality players at his disposal rather than winning a game with a tactical plan.


Last season the standard of play was tolerated because results were being ground out, although there was always a sense amongst the crowd that a more progressive approach could have seen the side better their eventual fourth-placed finish.

The real positive performances could be counted on one hand, with wins over Wolverhampton Wanderers and rivals Birmingham City the stand-out highlights, but even they were immediately followed by dropped points in the next fixture.

Whether it was an unwillingness or inability on Bruce’s part to find a more expansive game plan, we may never know, but it has cost the ex-Sunderland boss dearly.

Team selection and substitutions

Aside from how Villa played under Bruce, his team selections often left supporters baffled.

The Mile Jedinak experiment this term, which has seen the Aussie midfielder crowbarred in at centre-half, typifies that and has backfired spectacularly with a number of mistakes.

Talented Manchester United loanee Axel Tuanzebe looked a perfect fit in that position but has largely featured at right-back, Jack Grealish has been moved from an influential central role out to the left wing, with the one-dimensional Ahmed Elmohamady continuing to be deployed on the opposite flank despite the arrivals of both Anwar El Ghazi and Yannick Bolasie in August.

And when things weren’t going well, Bruce seemed unable to change the tide of a fixture with his substitutions.

Losing? Throw an extra striker on and hope for the best.

Winning? Shut up shop instead of going for the jugular.

It’s the curse of social media that every armchair fan thinks they can do a better job than the man in the hot seat, but as time wore on, more and more questions were thrown Bruce’s way, and he rarely came up with the answers.

Poor transfer dealings

A major myth that needs busting is that Bruce was not backed financially at Villa.

Granted, this summer was a testing one with the initial threat of financial implosion, but by August new billionaire owners were in place and signings on their way through the door.


A look at the transfer dealings from Bruce’s first window in charge (January 2017) proves damning; six players arriving for a combined total of around £23 million (a huge sum in Championship terms), and how many of those started the play-off final less than 18 months later?

One – Conor Hourihane.

That is symptomatic of a manager throwing money at a problem with no long-term plan in place.

Former England skipper John Terry arrived in the summer of 2017, along with fellow veterans Elmohamady, Glenn Whelan and, strangely, Christopher Samba.

Free transfers they may have been, but the club forked out a huge amount in wages to bring them in, on top of several high-profile loan signings.

Bruce had resources most in the division could only dream of and yes, did take the team to the brink of the Premier League, but promotion was his one and only remit and, to put it bluntly, he failed.

Excuses, excuses…

Villans became tired of their manager trotting out the same old excuses after disappointing results, ranging from poor refereeing decisions, to injuries, the weight of expectation at the club – the list goes on.

Rarely were the mediocre showings called out by the boss, which is fine in terms of protecting the players, but when it came to hearing the same line repeated for the umpteenth time in post-match interviews, fans began to wonder whether he should have been doing less talking and more work on the training pitch to address the rather obvious issues.

This season, Bruce’s go-to vindication for deteriorating displays was that the spine of the play-off team that he ‘built’ had left the club.

Yes, Sam Johnstone, Terry, Robert Snodgrass and Lewis Grabban departed at the end of last term, but three of those were only loan signings and the other, Terry, had penned just a one-year contract.

That is not ‘building a team’ – that is a short-term fix that yet again highlights his lack of foresight, and cannot be used to excuse sub-par results.

Losing the fans

The final nail in Bruce’s coffin, as is so often the case, was that he lost the Villa fanbase.

Whilst the likes of Chris Kirkland on Twitter, or Darren Bent, speaking to talkSPORT after the Preston game, would have us believe that his Birmingham City links contributed to that breakdown, that is in fact not the case.


After all, Bruce’s tenure at Blues came to an end over 10 years ago; there was not the proximity that made it difficult to accept Alex McLeish’s arrival in 2011.

His appointment was generally seen as a savvy one in October 2016, a safe pair of hands to take over matters at a time when the club appeared to be in free fall.

Fast forward two years and the picture is very different.

As mentioned above, the standard of football is diabolical, the players seemingly running around without cohesive instructions.

Bruce has also spent too much time recently sniping at his critics on the terraces, particularly after the win over Rotherham United, his only victory since August, when he suggested that ‘intelligent’ supporters would back him to remain in the job.

Once that relationship falls apart, it is near impossible to recover, and so it has proved.

What now?

The majority of the claret and blue faithful recognise that Bruce steadied the ship during a turbulent period in the club’s history and gave it his best in the 2017-18 campaign whilst dealing with testing personal circumstances.

Realistically, though, the game has now passed him by, his tactics and ‘roll your sleeves up’ attitude not enough to outwit younger, more astute managers.


The call to remove him from his post is almost unanimously seen by fans as the right one and the focus must now shift to getting in the proper replacement.

Dean Smith, Rafa Benitez and Thierry Henry are amongst the names being touted for what will be an attractive proposition to most bosses.

Yes, Bruce has left Villa without a recognised number one goalkeeper, despite signing two in the summer, while the team is desperately short of cover in defence, a peculiar legacy for a man who was once one of the country’s finest centre-backs.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of talent going forward; Grealish, Bolasie, El Ghazi, John McGinn, Tammy Abraham and Jonathan Kodjia are just some of the offensive options available.

Bruce fell short in finding a system to get the best out of them on a consistent basis; that’s the challenge for the new manager and will likely be the difference between success and failure.

[Axl Rose]

Chris Kirkland. A non entity of a player. Bruce may have been a good manager for him, when he was a player.

He wasn't very good for us from 2016 until the day he was sacked.

Fuck off Kirkland.

[Hillbilly]

I think the thing about Bruce being a promotion specialist is very much in the realm of "past performance is not a reliable guide to future returns". I remember reading that coaches in any sport rarely have a sustained period of success. They tend to have a purple patch and if they are exceptional/lucky it lasts up to 10 years. They may then be 'there or thereabouts' (to coin a phrase) but are on the downslope as the world moves on. There are exceptions who might have an indian summer (Ranieri) or access to the resources to cover up the shortfall (Ferguson). But Bruce had his day and it won't return.

[Bad English]

John Percy 40 second interview on 5 Live. 'A shapeless mess'.

Totally out of order. I know he looks a bit like a spud but less of the insults Mr Percy!

[mr underhill]

Is there anything more than can be said about Bruce? He's now a footnote in Villa history and has been dissected to death.

[SamTheMouse]

Fuck me, I can't believe there are people still saying McLeish or Bruce were unpopular because of the SHA connection.

Surely the point is that we never want anything we do to make the great unwashed happy, so if McLeish had been godlike for them, then poaching him would have made our day.

As it was, he was shit. They knew it, we knew it. That's why we didn't want him. It's all about the shitness.