Villa Blog: Aston Villa need an identity

With a game against fellow strugglers, Tim Sherwood's Aston Villa have an opportunity to show who they really are..writes Villa blogger Matt Turvey.

Will they emerge as victors and put their season on track, or is the manager's upheaval of the club set to look less like stepping forward, and more like regression.

As we reach 20% of the way through the season, the question is when things are going to look up. With Stoke City another team who have struggled, there's a chance for redemption or, at the very least, a stop to the repeated pain of Aston Villa's recent times.

Tim Sherwood's revolution hasn't so much stumbled as stopped, and there are increasing numbers of fans questioning just whether that revolution existed in the first place.

On paper, the result of recent games make for the same sort of stark reading that has become a routine for Villa - a point a game or less. In fact, should Villa lose against Stoke City, they will have managed a mere half a point per game.

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Which, if we're honest, is quite appalling. If survival is 40 points or so - although recent seasons have seen teams with less - an average of half a point a game is less than half that 40. Such a statement may sound dramatic and sensationalist, but the table doesn't lie.

Yes, Villa have faced both Manchester United and Liverpool in those opening seven games, but they have also faced far less resourced teams too. Some will say that Leicester City have also been doing well and therefore the loss to them must be discounted, but doesn't that sound awfully like making excuses?

After all, if losing to Leicester City is justifiable, then what exactly is the expectation? That Villa, a team once Champions of Europe, can only seek to beat promoted teams? Is that it?

If it is, and the result for the club becomes a constant drudgery of finishing 17th and picking up the cash, there's got to come a point where many fans decide that there's little point turning up.

Saying such a thing makes fans sound fickle, as though when the going gets tough, Villa fans disappear into the darkness, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

In fact, the fact that Villa still retain a diminished but decent set of attendance figures signals that many are fiercely loyal - turning up to games at times when the players don't appear to do so.

Under Sherwood, the ethos is different, and that effort seems to be expended more than in recent season, but the results are fairly similar. Attacking football, once seen by some as the way to the promised land, has yielded more goals, but the same kind of results. Attacking football, put simply, doesn't win games - scoring more goals than your opponent does.

However, some fans have tried to distill the game down to a very oversimplified version of events which is as far removed from reality as Jose Mourinho being the next Villa manager. Attacking has its place but, like any tactic, it can't be seen as some kind of panacea for footballing success - if it was, everyone would be doing it which, in turn, would mean that it wouldn't be successful at all.

The challenge for Villa is to find something that clicks in a world where there are a million ways to fail, and success isn't just flicking a switch that says "attack more".

Perhaps it is this simplistic attitude that has led Villa to their current troubles. Change was absolutely needed after the Paul Lambert era went from early dynamism through stagnation and on to going into reverse.

That said, Lambert - despite his failings - managed to keep the team up. It may not have been pretty, but it was ultimately effective, and this shouldn't be forgotten. Similarly Alex McLeish also kept the team up, and with far more stringent controls around finances than are in place today.

Does that make either Lambert or McLeish were dynamic trailblazers? No, but history should at least credit them with the ability to have survived.

Sherwood hasn't had a full season yet, and writing Villa off would be horrendously premature, but there are worrying signs. Teams that play attacking football with great players have success not so much because they espouse a certain philosophy, but because their standard of players are better. Style, in a sense, is irrelevant. Long term football fans will remember chants of "Boring, Boring Arsenal" when George Graham took them to successes, but winning is what matters - not style.

So with Sherwood's Villa playing more attractive football, the question remains - just when will Villa fans see more to their club's season than a slew of emotional words whilst ultimately being left empty handed? Or is there no real light at the end of the tunnel?

You can follow Matt Turvey's regular opinions at his own site, Aston Villa Life at http://www.astonvillalife.com, via the site's Twitter account @astonvillalife, or via his own Twitter account @mturvey_star.