Just how prepared are Villa this year?
Last Season: 17 wins, 11 draws, and 10 losses; they ended up with in sixth place with 62 points and a +6 goal differential. Like Everton, they’re in the Europa League Playoff Round; they bowed out of the UEFA Cup last season, fielding a reserve squad away to CSKA Moscow in the Round of 32.
Transfers In: Fabian Delph (Leeds United-£8.5 million), Stewart Downing (Middlesbrough-£12 million)
Transfers Out: Gareth Barry (Manchester City-£12 million), Zat Knight (Bolton-Undisclosed), Martin Laursen (Retired), Stuart Taylor (Manchester City-Free)
Season Outlook: They say that the best way to build a team is by building up it’s “spine”; a team should strive for a good centerback, a good central midfielder, and a good striker before they expand outward to the wings. Provided that that’s true, one must accept that the inverse is also true: the best way to destroy a team is to rip their spine out.
Such is the case with Aston Villa this season. In fact, Villa are suffering a double indignity: they’ve not only lost two members of their spine in Laursen and Barry; they’ve lost two captains of the team. Without that field leadership, Villa are at a very precarious point in their evolution under Martin O’Neill: all of these youth players they have are going to need someone to organize them, and right now no obvious heir apparent to either Laursen or Barry is on the team.
O’Neill probably has other things to worry about right now, though. Mainly, he needs to worry about depth, which is shockingly minimal. Villa’s entire squad is only thirty players, including the injured (and just purchased) Stewart Downing. Their style of play is a little chaotic; two wingers racing down the flanks, with speedy Gabriel Agbonlahor keeping pace, allows for great counterattacks but no sustained possession. Emile Heskey was supposed to have added to their attack, but his addition to the team coincided with both a change in formation and a change in form; Villa wouldn’t win a game in any competition between February 15th and April 25th, and when they finally got things sorted they found they were in sixth place. Including friendlies, Agbonlahor has only scored once since February 7th.
Both full seasons of Martin O’Neill’s tenure have seen Villa end up in sixth place. Supporters might have appreciated sixth place after David O’Leary’s dismal 11th place finish in 2006-07, but last season sixth place seemed like a consolation prize more than an accomplishment. Villa spent most of the first half of the year in contention for the Champions League, ever widening the gap between themselves and Arsenal. That collapse took the wind out of their sails, and at no point last season did they look like they would recover once they lost out.
So the challenge, then, is to take a small team without captains that’s on a bad run of form and improve them from sixth place to at least fifth place. That’s with Everton fielding a stronger side, Manchester City buying everyone in sight (including Gareth Barry, who spoke volumes about his faith in Villa when he left for a team not even competing in Europe), and Randy Lerner not willing to spend the same money this year that he was willing to spend last year. A fall is inevitable; my personal prediction has them in eighth place when this season’s all said and done, which will probably mean that O’Neill gets sacked around March.
That said: Villa looked pretty good in the Peace Cup. Without Friedel in goal, Guzan only let up three shots and looked good in a penalty shooutout against Juventus. So there may be a little hope.
