Aston Villa blog: Staring relegation in the face

After our win-less return post lockdown - and with West Ham’s surprise win against Chelsea on Wednesday night - the mountain we have to climb is just getting steeper all the time.

And with this scenario unfolding, thoughts now turn to what happens in the close season. What will become of Suso, Dean Smith, Richard O’Kelly and John Terry?

How many players will be leaving, either willingly, or let go? What will the future look like for us fans who, as ever will be left picking up the pieces and having to once again take the flak of yet another abject failure we have been witnessing unfold this season?

I’m not trying to be negative, but I’m also not blind to the situation we are about to enter into. Whilst we still have a small chance of redemption this season, it’s looking far from likely now that we will be sitting at the top table of English football come the start of next season.

By my estimation, this is about the 11th season of decline and can be tracked back to when Martin O’Neill walked out.

I am really struggling to work out how multiple owners employing multiple managers and spending hundreds of millions rebuilding squad after squad can keep getting things so wrong time after time.

If I had to lay the blame at someone’s feet for this seasons failure it would be at the recruitment and Suso, maybe the philosophy was flawed or he is just a poor judge of a player. It could be that simple. Maybe he didn’t fully understand what type of player Aston Villa needed in the Premier League to be competitive?

I wonder if Smith had been given free rein in the transfer market, would we be in this position now? I know he came from Brentford where this was also not his job to recruit players but surely he would have known better than a man who had only worked and played his entire career in Spain.

With Liverpool and Manchester United to come in the next week, things are looking bleak, but we thought that with 11 games to go last season.

Add to that, at one point we were just a couple of hours away from going into administration - so let’s hope we perform a third miracle escape this next few weeks.

I do think there is still another twist and let’s hope we are the ones who will benefit from it.