Aston Villa blogger Matthew Turvey gives his take on an unexpected issue that has split claret and blue fans – loaning out Gary Gardner to Coventry for a month.

On Thursday, Gary Gardner moved on a short term loan to local Championship team Coventry.

On the face of it, it seems like just another day in the life of Aston Villa. However, it would seem not according to at least some of the fans.

Loaning out Gardner has cultivated a split down the middle. For every fan that understands the move, another reviles it as yet another failure of the club and, in particular, manager Alex McLeish.

Our manager has certainly found himself no stranger when it comes to vitriol from sections of the support this season.

Whatever the reason this venom comes from, whether his former connections, or his seeming lack of a Plan B, adding yet another reason for him to be hated doesn’t seem surprising in the slightest.

Regarding Gardner, however, I struggle to get angry regarding the loan move. In fact, I feel positive about it.

Shipping younger players to lesser teams so they can progress under less pressure is excellent for youth development.

You only need look at Sir Alex Ferguson’s reputation for doing this to realise that loaning out the likes of Tom Cleverley and Danny Welbeck has done these players good, more so than tossing them into the United side.

Villa’s problem at present is that significant numbers of the first team play with a shocking apathy towards games, thus fans see young players as vivacious and thus capable of lifting the work rate of a team that is out of sorts.

The loss against Tottenham may have displayed terrible possession statistics, but the reality was that both goals were defensive errors.

Lack of communication between goalkeeper Shay Given and James Collins, or rather a mix-up, gave Emmanuel Adebayor one of the easiest goals of this career.

Getting back to Gary, whilst Gardner has performed well in the recent NextGen games and undoubtedly has a fine career ahead of him, the jump from under-19 football to the Premier League is a very large one.

Giving the lad a month in the Championship, where he will most likely start games in Coventry’s first team, is only going to build his confidence.

Those who disagree offer the thought that Gardner is good enough for the first team right now and, instead of shipping him out on loan, we should be shipping him into our own midfield.

They think he will be a shoe-in for an unsteady and muddled midfield where, on Monday alone, arguably every player besides Stiliyan Petrov was actually not a midfielder.

However, this desire to bring Gardner in immediately is indicative of a significantly larger problem which I touched upon earlier – the belief that the youth are salvation for the team.

The fact is that the youth, good as they may be, need to be developed organically and this means giving them proper environment to grow.

It doesn’t mean throwing them into games against some of the biggest clubs in the country just because they are a different option to what isn’t currently working.

Just because something isn’t working, it doesn’t mean that anything different invariably will work. You can fail at things 100 different ways without getting it right.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand the rationality of ‘picking the other option’ when things don’t work.

If a defender is playing badly, drop him. If a striker isn’t scoring, give someone else a go. The view is directly related to being sensible.

Where this concept gets destroyed though is when ‘picking the other option’ becomes a large stick to beat people over the head with.

Suggesting we could have won with a different formation or a different team is valid, of course, but it isn’t provable.

I have lost track of arguments where fans have told me, whether in the pub, online, or at Villa Park, that ‘playing 4-4-2 would have won the match’ and then gone on to use that opinion and represent it as fact.

The facts of the matter though is that opinion and fact are two completely different beasts. If people leave this statement as ‘opinion’ and justify them accordingly as thus, then things stay rational.

However, when the two become intermingled, it cultivates a very destructive ‘us and them’ attitude. Football, for all of it’s relative simplicity as a concept, has a lot more to it than picking a team for fantasy football.

Just because 4-2-3-1 doesn’t work, doesn’t mean 4-4-2 will. All it means is that it might.

If things really were that easy, if football played out like the FIFA video game, or football management simulator Football Manager, we would all be professional managers.

Which, of course, we are not. So, whilst the decision to send youth team players may be questioned by fans, I have faith in the fact that it is a positive step towards developing these young players.

Given the lack of positives in recent weeks, frankly I am glad to be able to find a positive in this week, even if not everyone will agree with me.

The future may well be bright. We can only hope that Sunday brings a glimmer of hope to the present.

You can also follow Villa blogger Matthew Turvey at his own site, http://www.astonvillalife.com.