Why Villa really need to get a grip

Villa intend on staging a meeting of the Supporters Consultation Group before Saturday's Premier League match against Bolton.

With delicious gallows humour typical at times of discontent, one wit has already remarked he will only attend if he is promised a signed shirt from the new manager.

If you miss the joke, both - manager and shirt - are still missing at the region's 'marquee' club 31 days and six uneven games into the new season despite having been ordered some time ago.

Their absence offers the most worrying evidence so far that Villa Park remains in rudderless decline, 36 days after Martin O'Neill made his spitefully-timed and melodramatic exit.

O'Neill's legacy is a mixed bag of brilliant but unfulfilled potential on the pitch and a club worryingly bereft of football experience off it.

What else are we to make of the French farce of Gerard Houllier's arrival and immediate departure or the commercial-cum-PR disaster that is the non-availibility until November of souvenir shirts?

Sadly, the trail of responsibility leads back to the office of a man whose motives are unimpeachable but whose delivery suddenly leaves a lot to be desired.

Randy Lerner is a hugely-decent American owner whose generosity and values at Villa Park are commendable and undisputed.

But while criticising him echoes the pot-shots taken at Sir Jack Hayward during his ownership of Wolves, just like Sir Jack the generosity does not make him immune from grave errors — and O'Neill's foot-stomping flounce from the playground five days before the season began have now exposed them. Two in particular.

The first was to put too much power into the hands of the man the Americans liked to call "coach O'Neill" when they made their entry into Villa Park and English football in 2006.

Such was the esteem David O'Leary's successor quite properly enjoyed as one of the game's most eminent coaches, what he wanted he got.

The early years of the liaison masked the problems to come.

While a revolving door was fixed to the office of chief executive, the drain of solid and redoubtable Villa personnel whose experience and expertise were vital to the club's day-to-day smooth running was casually ignored as the entire club fell under the spell of its former manager - a second major lapse in Lerner's leadership.

Most obviously, the hand-holding that Villa stalwarts such as its former first officer Steve Stride could have provided during these early years slipped the Americans' grasp.

While fresh-faced chief executive Paul Faulkner, recruited from Lerner's MBNA group where he was previously 'relationship manager,' floundered in the hunt for O'Neill's successor, UEFA have persuaded Stride to interrupt his retirement and take on the role of senior delegate at major European games this winter.

That will tell Villa fans much, I fear.

By the time O'Neill shocked football with his resignation - and incidentally took with him an entire backroom staff — all Villa had to guide them through the minefield that is a top-level manager hunt was Lerner, his faithful ally General Charles Krulak, Faulkner and the board's fourth member, chief financial officer Robin Russell.

It was a quartet distinguished by a painfully obvious lack of football know-how and background — and frankly the Houllier mess showed it.

Each development adds to the bafflement. After Monday's defeat at Stoke, caretaker coach Kevin MacDonald — highly valued by Lerner and rightly so — admitted that he was "re-evaluating" his future plans.

MacDonald is entitled to be embarrassed by the turn of events that saw him pushed into the public dance of applying for the job, though clearly reluctant, to be then slapped across the cheek by Houllier's appointment.

Didn't someone think to have a word with him? Why expose him to such public humiliation? It may be the American way to line up all the candidates outside the chairman's office with their power-point presentations in an executive briefcase, but it doesn't work like that in English football.

Respect and esteem are everything - pieces are moved into place with a quiet word here and a gentle nudge there.

How can MacDonald retain any kind of authority in the dressing room when he has been given such a dismissive public dressing down?

As a result, we now have a Villa team being run by a coach and his allies whose morale will have taken a dreadful battering.

Fancy being asked to continue doing a job for which the company don't think you're good enough while the man they have elected strolls in at his leisure?

It is a nonsense and ill-befitting of Aston Villa.

By all accounts, the hierarchy were staggered by Saturday morning's 'press' following the Houllier media unveiling, oblivious to the impact of a manager who is not a universally-acclaimed pick among Villa fans saying "au revoir" so quickly after his "bonjour."

This image of a man who many consider extremely fortunate to get the job treating it with such casual early regard will stick in the craw for so many — cementing the view that Aston Villa, flagship club of the Midlands, is in the hands of well-meaning but hopelessly naive and ill-equipped administrators.

This is a season which in the West Midlands has opened with some new identities taking shape.

Wolves are accused of being the new Stoke. Blues are endeavouring to be the new Villa, while Villa are looking more and more like the new Blues. All gaffes and own goals.

Lerner needs to get a grip more quickly than his chosen manager has decided to.

Past evidence does not fill me with much hope he will do so.

By Martin Swain