Editorial

So what's going on then? Everybody's got their own theory why a team that took the league by storm last season should be reduced to anonymous mediocrity this time round.

And here's mine. Last season the team were determined to make their mark and show the world just how good they were. Written-off, ignored and underrated, they were out to show what they were capable of. Now I've got a horrible feeling that a few of them think that the job's finished and they can get the rewards without any of the hard work. Well the results this season are proving that one wrong.

Take Mark Draper. Twelve months ago he was shaping up to be our best and most influential midfielder since Gordon Cowans, mixing sublime passing ability with a pleasing tendency to get stuck in and really dictate the play. Quite rightly he was in the England squad and couldn't have been far off a place in the Euro 96 squad. What happened to him during the summer I don't know, but Draper this season is unrecognisable, anonymous and drifting through games.

The same rnalaise seems to have affected what was the best defence in the country. Ugo isn't the same player he was, Gareth Southgate has been playing in fits and starts and Carl Tiler isn't the long term answer. Steve Staunton fits in only to then get injured again and we are still looking for the right combination. Yes, I know were missing Paul McGrath. The thing is, we're missing the Paul McGrath of his peak years. The current one would have been no better to us over the course of a season than anyone else we've got.

Fernando Nelson's main role lately has been to see us hoping for the quick return of Gary Charles, while Alan Wright's another player who hasn't hit last season's form. Maybe it's time to rest him and give Steve Staunton a run in his best position.

Last issue we were talking about the imminent departure of Savo Milosevic and the signing of a replacement. Four weeks later and now he says he wants to stay. You can't blame him for not wanting to go to Perugia, after all they hardly made him feel wanted, although things weren't handled too well at this end either. Obviously £4.5 million for Savo came into the 'too good to be true' category but when that figure fell down then any ordinary chairman would have attempted to strike a deal. Not ours, though. A figure had been agreed and he stuck to it. So we were left with a player who doesn't fit in and an unsaleable asset. Nice work Doug.

But this should have been a minor problem. Look at the one fact that's been staring us in the face since the season started. It's obvious that we need a striker, so money should be no object. After all, a successful buy would repay itself many times over in the future. Not at Villa, though, where the balance sheet must always come first.

It's this lack of vision and total reluctance to invest that was the main reason why Villa were so spectacularly unsuccessful for the first decade of Doug's reign. I really though we had seen the last of his penny pinching and that at long last he bad come to terms with the realities of life at the top of the Premiership. Now it seems we're back to square one and that anybody with any real ambition will be looking elsewhere. If this sort of situation continues, how long before our genuinely world class players and you know who they are as well as I do are looking to move elsewhere, to clubs that build on success rather than cash in on it?

It's no good Doug saying that we can't afford to spend millions. After alI, if he's such a good businessman and the club's as well-off as he claims it is, then the money should be there. Just look what's going on elsewhere. The combined attendances for the Leeds and Leicester games were over 76,000. There are three, maybe four clubs in the country who can match that. None of them need to sell a player before they can buy one. Look at Everton, a club who by rights shouldn't be talked about in the same breath as the Villa. They spend almost six million on Barmby, then talk about a similar amount for Mark Draper. They don't say they can't afford it. Newcastle are reportedly over £20 million in debt. And they're still buying.

Now look at the Villa. We offer a derisory amount for Stan Collymore, then plead poverty and look to sell a couple of players in order to put in another bid. Yet again we show an image to the world of a club that would love to compete with the high flyers but can't.

Even if there wasdt sufficient money available, then there's an easy way of getting some, Other clubs are raising tens of millions of pounds by stock market floatation. Even Nottingham Forest, on the verge of going out of business not long ago, are reckoning on having ten million to spend on new players soon. The rise in the value of Villa shares during the summer proves that the club would be attractive to investors, so going public would be an undoubted success. But Doug refuses to think of such a move. If it's right for every other ambitious club, then why would it be wrong for Aston Villa? A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that it's because Doug won't do anything that will mean him giving up total control of the Villa.

We've been down this road before, and we know where it leads. Do we want to be yet another medium-sized club who have the occasional bit of success then settle for years of mediocrity? Forest and Norwich did that, and look where it got them.

Doug wants success for the Villa. We all do. But some of us can see that in order to get that success in present-day football, you have to look a bit further than using the economics of the corner shopkeeper.

The Leicester game will hopefully be a watershed of the same kind as QPR in 1989 and Chelsea four years ago. Certainly the Villa are at a crossroads. Either we take the Manchester United road, or we take the Manchester City one.

Maybe I've missed something somewhere along the line, but what's the point of buying a new player and then selling another? Surely that just replaces one problem with another.

The crowds so far have been marvellous, but they can't be expected to keep turning up to watch the rubbish we've witnessed far too often already this season at Villa Park. There are also plenty of us who have been down the road of raised hopes and broken promises too many times, and once more might be the last straw.

I hope that this bit of doom-mongering hasn't made you feel too pessimistic. It wouldn't take much to get the team back on track again and a couple of wins coinciding with a rise up the league table and a cup run would have us garlanding statues of our beloved chairman.

But the last few weeks has shown, yet again, that when the going gets tough .. the Villa look the other way.

Day by Day

26th October: Sunderland 1 Villa 0 was easily our worst performance of the season. We were second to every ball, should have been losing long before we were and only Mark Bosnich prevented a heavier defeat. The only bright spot was the last quarter of an hour, but an equaliser would have been a travesty, as was £ 1 6 to stand on an open terrace.

27th October: Savo is off to Perugia for £4.5 million.

28th October: Bozzie, who shouldn't have bothered getting up this season, needs an operation on his knee and is out for a month

2nd November: Rumours abound - Savo's in. town, his transfer's off, it's back on again, he's failed a medical, Pierre Van Hooydonk's in the ground, Fabrizio Ravanelli's been spotted in New Street, all these and more were doing the rounds before kick-off. Villa 2 Nottingham Forest 0 was efficient rather than spectacular. Forest had three good chances early on but luckily they fell to Jason Lee, but as soon as Cart Tiler got his goal they collapsed just like a team on the crest of a slump. Dwight's goal was a cracker and we should have got a couple of others. Without Mark Draper there was plenty more aggression in midfield, but less of a threat. Still it's three points and they'll come in handy at the end of the season. If we're looking for a striker Forest have got one but all he did was stick his tongue out and run around a lot without ever looking like scoring . Sound familiar?

3rd November: According to the Sunday papers, Savo's deal is collapsing. No problem, because we're buying Phil Babb, Lee Clarke and Andy Cole.

6th November: Villa Res 7 Middlesborough Res 2. One of our irregular forays to the Stadio del Bescot to check up on the Future, and an eventful night it was too. The conditions were awful, the bar was closed and the Antichrist in attendance. Luckily the football was good enough, with Reuben Hazell particularly impressive. Joachim showed again that he's good enough for the Premiership when he puts his mind to it and Mark Draper must have been heartily pissed off. Trev couldn't have been too pleased seeing eleven reserves who could walk into his team. but he didn't storm off before the end.

11th November: Birmingham City, who are on Yet another suspended sentence, last chance, we're sorry and promise we won't do it again, are cleared of charges arising from the Maine Road riot because they say they've dealt with the miscreants. Then they say they'll deal with them as soon as they're caught, Spot the contradiction there? Spot the FA yet again bottling out of having to really do something about them.?

12th November Brian says he's having more talks with Perugia and hopes it'll all be sorted in the next couple of days, The way it's going Savo'll be due a testimonial before he leaves

14th November Reports say that Villa are holding a press conference tomorrow to announce the arrival of Stan Collymore. Not so, says Roy Evans.

15th November: This morning's stories have Draper going to Liverpool and Savo going nowhere. There's no press conference. There was an FA hearing for Bossie, though, and he gets fined £1,000 which in the circumstances is about the bolt he could hope for.

16th November: A grey, horrible day, stories of pubs getting wrecked in town, a nasty edge to the atmosphere and Villa playing awful. Villa 1 Leicester 3 could have been 1986. Even when Leicester took the lead there was no urgency to the Villa and you could say that we equalised against the run of play. The penalty was controversial' even to the London press, so draw your own conclusions, but it shouldn't mask a game where some alarming deficiencies were only too obvious. The defence is clearly not up to the required standard and our attacking seems to consist of getting the ball to Dwight in the . hope that he can do something. Brian should have learnt by now that lan Taylor isn't a right back and taking him out of midfield leaves us with little bite in that area, Sasa Curcic might be a great footballer, but I thought we'd bought him to score a few goals. Leicester are an ordinary team with a well-organised defence. As Helsingborg showed, that's enough to beat the Villa. This season is slipping away from us and if something isn't done rapidly it will be gone.

17th November: Savo's deal is reported to have collapsed with Perugia offering £2 million. Newcastle are interested in Bossie.

18th November: Reaction to the weekend Nobody's going anywhere, except Savo, who's still off to Italy. No offers have been received, no bids made. Everything's fine and dandy. Oh yes.

19th November: Savo's move finally collapses. He says he's not going anywhere because we've been telling him how much we love him.

22nd November: Brian says Savo's here till the end of the season, nobody else is leaving or arriving. Still it gave us something to talk about, eh?

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