Aston Villa comment: Steve Bruce was a nearly man at a club where nearly was never going to be enough

He was appointed in October 2016, chiefly due to his reputation of being a promotion specialist and tasked with getting the club back to the Premier League.

He departs now, nearly two years later, having failed to achieve it, yet also knowing he got agonisingly close.

On May 26, Bruce and Villa were just 90 minutes away from their goal. The failure against Fulham in the play-off final, however, only served to sum up Bruce’s entire reign: Nearly, but not quite.

Over the 102 games of which he took charge, Bruce typically got results out of his team. His win percentage, though admittedly with the large caveat recorded entirely in the second tier, ranks among the best of any Villa boss in history.

Yet when the stakes were at their highest, he was ultimately unable to deliver. Not just at Wembley but also in the closing weeks of last season when Villa, having worked hard to get automatic promotion within their sights, dramatically ran out of steam.

Now, after a summer where the arrival of new owners offered a fresh start, he has been unable to achieve the results surely possible with a playing squad which, while not without deficiencies, remains among the Championship’s most talented.

The end was chaotic and bordered on farce, Bruce having a cabbage thrown at him by one irate supporter as tempers boiled over during Tuesday’s barmy 3-3 draw with Preston.

The man who pulled the club out of freefall, who battled on during the second half of last season despite losing both parents in the space of a few weeks, did not deserve that. Nobody does. It was a disgraceful act.

What it did serve to highlight, however, was a relationship with supporters which had become broken beyond repair.

There could no longer be any hiding from the increasingly poisonous atmosphere amid a fanbase where voices of dissent have grown steadily in number, week by week.

Villa appeared in danger of unravelling and the board were, ultimately, left with no choice but to act, chief executive Christian Purslow delivering the news yesterday morning.

Bruce is blessed with a sense of perspective in a sport where such a quality is sorely lacking.

Yet this will be among his lowest moments in more than four decades in football. Villa were the club he had been waiting for through 20 years at the managerial coalface and ultimately, he has proven to be not quite good enough.

Though his reign has ended in failure, it was not without some success. Villa certainly stand a far prouder, more united club today than the one he walked into.

Back then, Bruce seemed the ideal man to lift a club which had won just five of its previous 51 games.

For a time, he proved precisely that.

Bruce deserves to be remembered as the man who stopped the rot, who set about cleaning up a toxic dressing room and restoring a sense of fighting spirit.

The club’s off-field issues, never far from the surface, also provide a modicum of mitigation. Bruce often worked with restrictions, bringing in more than £20million in transfer fees, while spending just £2million, during the summer of 2017.

But it is also true that, on the occasions Bruce did get to spend significant money, too often the players purchased failed to justify the outlay – Scott Hogan and Henri Lansbury being the two most obvious examples.

While no-one will argue Bruce got an easy gig, he was almost always able to call on a squad of players the envy of almost every other manager in the division.

This season has been no different. Bruce, the only senior figure to remain at the club during a summer of major change off-the-field, knew he needed strong early results to steady his own position, despite the owners’ public backing. He simply failed to achieve them.

True, the chaotic nature of Villa’s summer, in which former owner Tony Xia’s cash crisis brought the club to the brink of administration, was always going to mean a period of transition.

In today’s game, however, such periods must be brief. You cannot remain travelling forever. In recent weeks, Bruce had given little indication he knew where Villa’s ultimate destination was, let alone the best way to get there.

The philosophy of being solid at the back and relying on match-winners in attack will not work when you can’t nail down the first part.

Villa’s defence, to put it mildly, has been a mess. Missing out on the signings of Joe Bryan, Harold Moukoudi and Scott McKenna didn’t help. But Bruce also let Tommy Elphick leave for Hull without securing a replacement, his faith in Mile Jedinak’s ability to play at centre-back proving questionable at best.

After a bright start, with Villa winning their opening two games, results rapidly subsided. Moments when the team appeared to be finding their stride remained only that. The 4-1 drubbing at Sheffield United and Tuesday’s second half performance against Preston ranked among the poorest of Bruce’s reign.

There felt the very real danger of the manager undoing whatever progress he had made over the past two years.

What happens next will provide the clearest indication yet of the direction the until now largely silent owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens wish to take the club, or indeed precisely who is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Brentford boss Dean Smith, who grew up a Villa supporter, is the popular choice among supporters. Chris Wilder, who has done so well at Sheffield United, is another surely worthy of consideration.

Much more likely, however, is a marquee name such as Thierry Henry, who was so strongly linked in the summer, or someone from the stable of Jorge Mendes, the super agent who appears to be wielding an increasing influence at Bodymoor Heath.

Whoever gets the job will inherit a good squad but also a challenge which remains among the toughest in English football.

Bruce, the seventh Villa manager to lose his job in the space of almost as many years, can reflect he did far better than most of his recent predecessors.

But it still wasn’t enough.