Confusion reigns over Aston Villa manager role
It has been over three weeks since Martin O’Neill walked out on Aston Villa, leaving them high and dry ahead of the new season.
He had his reasons of course, but his timing could certainly have been better. In the time that has followed, enough heels have dragged to leave several scuffs on the Villa Park carpet.
Today, caretaker boss Kevin MacDonald has finally put his name forward for the job on a permanent basis – presumably buoyed by Sunday’s rather fortuitous home win over Everton. But in the immediate aftermath of that game, club chief executive Paul Faulkner released a statement declaring that candidates for the job would soon start to be interviewed, and that it would be of “crucial importance that candidates have experience of managing in the Premier League.” MacDonald has none of that outside of the last three weeks, so surely the Scot’s announcement today has just muddied the waters, which were murky enough already.
The situation means that on a day when the majority of other Premier League clubs are battling travel restrictions, smuggling international forwards through customs at crowded airports filled with eagle-eyed supporters and dodging over-excited Sky Sports News reporters outside their training grounds, Villa are still scouring the CVs of potential managers.
The rumour mill has been working overtime, with a mixture of guesswork and facts plucked out of thin air, that say David Moyes is set to abandon all of the good work that he’s done at Everton for a switch to Villa Park. He won’t be.
The American World Cup coach Bob Bradley has ruled himself out of the running for the position – rather conveniently given that he doesn’t meet Faulkner’s apparently crucial criteria – and so the usual suspects are being ushered forward into the limelight, a position not too uncomfortable for Sven-Göran Eriksson, still many people’s tip for the job.
Elsewhere, and rather bizarrely, Mark Hughes continues to be linked to Villa despite only taking over at Fulham this summer. Three Premier League games and three draws into his Craven Cottage career, quite why he’d want to jump ship now isn’t clear, but he’s probably being mentioned simply because there are precious few realistic candidates that look qualified to live up to Faulkner’s billing.
Had O’Neill quit earlier in the summer, then the prospect of seeing Hughes at Villa would have been a very real one. Now, surely not.
But this is a real mess that Villa find themselves in. The uncertainty surrounding the club has meant that only Stephen Ireland has been added to the squad this summer, but of course that came with the loss of James Milner. Quite what Villa could have done with the Milner money looks to be the great unanswered question of their season, which has started with an early European exit and that 6-0 demolition at Newcastle United.
Of course there have been two home victories over a poor West Ham (with Milner in the side and on the scoresheet) and that unconvincing display against Everton, but they appear to be lacking both direction and leadership at the moment.
Perhaps MacDonald will eventually provide that, but it is difficult for his to do so in his current temporary role.
Should they give him the job on a permanent basis, then they would be going against Faulkner’s weekend declaration, but perhaps that is the best thing for the club at the moment.
After all, with all that has gone on in the past three weeks, MacDonald will have picked up more top-flight experience than many could manage in three years.
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