Rank every Villa manager post MON

[kurtsimonw]

36 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

But what has he done since?

To be fair, you have to go back to Graham Taylor Mk I to find a Villa manager who went on to bigger things. Even then he failed as England manager.

[TRO]

49 minutes ago, VillaFaninLondon said:

Jack at the time was going out on the lash every week, and Gabby was an overweight has-been who wasn't interested. Of course they're going to blame Garde rather than themselves.

 

Garde's time with us was a disaster but there's no question he was thrown under the bus by the players and owner. 

players usually pick up very quickly whether a manager has the nous or not......but they just have to keep their own counsel.

[Mazrim]

I agree with the points on Garde. I just don't see why they don't apply to Sherwood too? He was just as much thrown under the bus.
He was given the same misfit players to use. It was Paddy Riley's choices, I'm 100% convinced of that. He convinced Lerner he could reinvest the Benteke money into a capable group of players and had carte blanche.

Anyway, it's all history now and I've no interest in being Sherwood's advocate.

[KentVillan]

Just now, TRO said:

players usually pick up very quickly whether a manager has the nous or not......but they just have to keep their own counsel.

I think one manager can’t turn around a sick club. Like a lot of “sleeping giants” Villa had the worst combination of enough money and talent to stay in the Premier League, but nowhere near enough decent leadership and structures in place to stop that talent from either stagnating or moving to better clubs.

We had an impressive line of players who now do the rounds on the podcasts and Soccer AM boasting about their extracurricular activities. Don’t think you can pin that on one manager. The problem was it was often the best players who were the worst behaved, so very hard to stop the rot.

[sharkyvilla]

5 minutes ago, Mazrim said:

I agree with the points on Garde. I just don't see why they don't apply to Sherwood too? He was just as much thrown under the bus.
He was given the same misfit players to use. It was Paddy Riley's choices, I'm 100% convinced of that. He convinced Lerner he could reinvest the Benteke money into a capable group of players and had carte blanche.

Anyway, it's all history now and I've no interest in being Sherwood's advocate.

Look at the careers some of those players have gone on to have compared to Sherwood's managerial one.

[tomav84]

1 hour ago, TRO said:

When you trawl through all these managers and owners and  consider all the money, we have spent on players we have failed to get a tune out of or develop in to better players.....its a bloody wonder, we are where we are....i would have finished some clubs.

its been not much short of a catastrophe.....shocking really.

we've a good chance of going down and we're all gutted about that, but sometimes you need a bit of perspective such as this

[TRO]

41 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

I think one manager can’t turn around a sick club. Like a lot of “sleeping giants” Villa had the worst combination of enough money and talent to stay in the Premier League, but nowhere near enough decent leadership and structures in place to stop that talent from either stagnating or moving to better clubs.

We had an impressive line of players who now do the rounds on the podcasts and Soccer AM boasting about their extracurricular activities. Don’t think you can pin that on one manager. The problem was it was often the best players who were the worst behaved, so very hard to stop the rot.

I think you make a really good point....I too think its hard for one manager to turn around a sick club.

Ron Saunders did make an impact,as a single manager, but Vic Crowe left him some great kids, Ron achieved the trick that gives you time, incremental improvement, just about every player he bought for peanuts, he made a better player out of them, Tony Barton was his scout as well as his assistant and like Peter Talor with Cloughie had a great eye for a player......sure different times now and getting the right players at the right price is far more difficult.

Hanging on to the good ones we do get, is also hard.....and one or two get easily picked off in a duck shoot......The trick is to get 4 or 5 at the same time to show ambition and try to add to it.....I guess FFP has scuppered that idea.

Its going to be very hard to progress under our present circumstances, but try, we must do.

Edited March 5, 2020 by TRO

[TRO]

12 minutes ago, tomav84 said:

we've a good chance of going down and we're all gutted about that, but sometimes you need a bit of perspective such as this

You do need perspective, very true.......but what we need above all, is defiance.....to defy adversity.....a complete and utter refusal to accept defeat as inevitable as it might seem...... we will only get back to a respectable Premier Leagur club, if we adopt that attitude.

We must find a way of being Winners again...I would give up the spectacle for 11 games if it meant staying up.

Fighters win through.....we cannot accept mediocrity, no matter how much adversity stares us in the face.

We now need to create that seige mentality in the last remaing games.

Edited March 5, 2020 by TRO

[Herman22]

I'm not going to do a ranking but I think Houiller was such bad luck. I think if we had 2-3 season with him in charge we could have been looking up the table. Unfortunately, McLeish got the job and it was all downhill from there on. 

I think Lambert did a decent job due to the constraints place on him. 

DS has massively over achieved to get us to the prem. He had to spend big in the summer and I'm still confident he will keep us up. 

[Mazrim]

49 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

Look at the careers some of those players have gone on to have compared to Sherwood's managerial one.

Some of them were/are good players, but not a team and little thought went into assembling a team. And a good portion of them were shit under 3 managers, gutless and / or couldn't be arsed. The flipside of your coin is that Sherwood got the best out of the homegrown players. Like Grealish, Delph, Cleverley etc. Maybe that was his forte? Maybe if he had his way in the market we would have bought a team of players more suited to his methodology and would have comfortably survived? Maybe Sherwood really is just a bad manager but a good coach who ran out of ideas? *shrug*

[VillaFaninLondon]

10 minutes ago, Mazrim said:

Some of them were/are good players, but not a team and little thought went into assembling a team. And a good portion of them were shit under 3 managers, gutless and / or couldn't be arsed. The flipside of your coin is that Sherwood got the best out of the homegrown players. Like Grealish, Delph, Cleverley etc. Maybe that was his forte? Maybe if he had his way in the market we would have bought a team of players more suited to his methodology and would have comfortably survived? Maybe Sherwood really is just a bad manager but a good coach who ran out of ideas? *shrug*

The way to look at it is would those players scouted from the continent in ‘15 improve us now?

 

Traore - yes

Veretout - yes 

Amavi - probably yes

Gueye - yes

Ayew - possibly

 

Pretty much all of them play in European competition now other than Ayew.

 

I think if you put those players in our side now I’d be very surprised if we were struggling.

 

Of course they were younger then, newer to the country etc and Traore had been very hit and miss up until this season, but it’s still a failure of epic proportions not to get a tune out of at least a couple of those players. And that is where Sherwood messed up.

[kurtsimonw]

Surely you could argue that Sherwood didn't have them all that long, and when Garde had them they would've been settled?

Garde for me has to be last, simply because he achieved nothing. Who is the worst manager of the 2 is up for debate given neither has really done anything, but Sherwood actually achieved something (safety) at Villa.

[Stevo985]

2 minutes ago, kurtsimonw said:

Surely you could argue that Sherwood didn't have them all that long, and when Garde had them they would've been settled?

Garde for me has to be last, simply because he achieved nothing. Who is the worst manager of the 2 is up for debate given neither has really done anything, but Sherwood actually achieved something (safety) at Villa.

The only reason I put Garde ahead of Sherwood is because I think it was a totally impossible situation. Like I said I think the best manager int he world wouldn't have saved us.

And it was Sherwood who created it. Or played a major part in it at least.

[DCJonah]

Not much to discuss just IMO lambert was easily the worst of them all. 

He set in stone a losing mentality that could never be recovered from. He made the atmosphere amongst fans and at the ground so toxic it was going to take years to improve. Really the short term boost from his removal was never going to be sustained. 

An awful manager and played the biggest part in our demise. 

Edited March 5, 2020 by DCJonah

[villalad21]

33 minutes ago, Herman22 said:

DS has massively over achieved to get us to the prem.

Which isn't true of course.

[JAMAICAN-VILLAN]

3 hours ago, VillaFaninLondon said:

I like the look of Phillips but it's hard to say how he'd have done with us this season. Before we signed Nakamba many were saying he could be the new Kante, also Luiz was being massively hyped before we signed him, and while both of those have had good games for us and clearly have talent, they've also had many bad games and have struggled with the step up to this league.

 

Phillips is a 'harder' type of player than them though and used to the English physicality, he's also very disciplined in the DM role and probably got a better range of passing than those two and has much better work rate, so maybe we should have paid the money. Leeds were asking for a stupidly high price though given he was unproven at the top level, IIRC it was £25-30mil. 

This is the part which I feel we have been missing.

[Okonokos]

36 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

Which isn't true of course.

Did you see where we were in the table before he took over? Even Purslow said when we got promoted that we were a year ahead of schedule.

[VillaFaninLondon]

6 minutes ago, Okonokos said:

Did you see where we were in the table before he took over? Even Purslow said when we got promoted that we were a year ahead of schedule.

We were massively underachieving when he came in though. Any Championship team with Jack, Tammy, McGinn, Axel, Bolasie and AEG in it was always going to pick up regardless of who took over.

[villalad21]

15 minutes ago, Okonokos said:

Did you see where we were in the table before he took over? Even Purslow said when we got promoted that we were a year ahead of schedule.

We were 2 pts off 6th when he got sacked...

I swear to God some of you people make it sound like we were 15 pts off and way off drift top 6.

Smith had a very good chance of making the top 6 and those adds strengthened even further after the January transfer window and he did. I say well done. He did what he was expected to do.

 

Edited March 5, 2020 by villalad21

[Okonokos]

3 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

We were 2 pts off 6th when he got sacked...

I swear to God some of you people make it sound like we were 15 pts off and way off drift top 6.

Smith had a very good chance of making the top 6 and those adds strengthened even further after the January transfer window and he did. I say well done. He did what he was expected to do.

 

We were in an absolute mess in the last few games under Bruce. Remember cabbage gate? Remember playing 3 right backs and an injured James Chester in the back four? Then Grealish's 3 month injury. Sometimes the table doesn't show all those things. When Smith took over I was more than happy to give him the season and expect promotion the following season.