Just to cheer you all up...
From Football365.com
* Only Manchester City and Chelsea have had a net transfer spend bigger than Birmingham in the last two years of the Premier League.
* No club has scored fewer goals than Birmingham in the last two years of the Premier League.
Never mind that Alex McLeish is the former manager of Birmingham City - those two facts alone should scare the bejesus out of any Villa fans seeing the Scot's name at the top of the betting for Gerard Houllier's old job. This is a manager who has spent an awful lot of money building a side that's as dull as elevator music.
There is a myth that McLeish has not been backed in the transfer market by Carson Yeung. While it's true that Yeung never delivered the £50m war chest rumoured in the media upon takeover, he has spent the best part of £40m in two years on new players. Meanwhile, not one player has been sold for a sizeable transfer fee while clubs on similar budgets have sold their biggest assets to balance the books.
Those figures do not include high-profile, expensive loan signings for Alex Hleb, Obafemi Martins and David Bentley last season while the last available wage figures show that in 2009-10 they paid their players £8million more than Wolves despite a lower turnover. All this money has bought a trophy but also the second relegation of McLeish's tenure. And still the media would have you believe that McLeish has been let down by his owners in not backing his vision for the club.
The football has - for the most part - been truly rotten. They have delivered less than a goal a game over the last two seasons and no Birmingham striker scored in the final eight games of last season. For two successive seasons their Player of the Year award has gone to their goalkeeper. No Premier League stopper made more saves than Ben Foster last season - despite playing much of the season behind two central defenders now valued at a combined price of almost £30m.
Even on the final day of the season when victory against an out-of-form, unmotivated Tottenham side would have brought Premier League survival, he selected a 4-5-1 formation designed to avoid defeat and hoped results elsewhere would save Birmingham. His mindset is set to negative and in the end the Blues were punished with their second relegation in three years.
Hands up any Villa fans facing a tedious McLeish future who really wish they hadn't made such a fuss about Steve McClaren?
Sarah Winterburn
