Mark Albrighton Posted May 24, 2023 VT Supporter Share Posted May 24, 2023 Recently I’ve been wondering about what would have happened if Gregory had stuck around working with Little. Those two together we have arguably our most successful season in the premier league. Fourth and a cup probably beats finishing second. Gregory leaves early at the start of the following season. We don’t drastically decline, but we certainly don’t improve. The season after things nosedive and Little leaves. Gregory comes back in and the good times roll. For a while it was fantastic but the wheels come off, we can’t quite manage a full season and burn out. This isn’t so much a Little v Gregory thought exercise. It’s more of a musing that perhaps the styles and the personalities of the two were complimentary to each other and was a winning combination that we only experienced briefly despite them both being at the club for a number of years. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KentVillan Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 1 minute ago, Mark Albrighton said: Recently I’ve been wondering about what would have happened if Gregory had stuck around working with Little. Those two together we have arguably our most successful season in the premier league. Fourth and a cup probably beats finishing second. Gregory leaves early at the start of the following season. We don’t drastically decline, but we certainly don’t improve. The season after things nosedive and Little leaves. Gregory comes back in and the good times roll. For a while it was fantastic but the wheels come off, we can’t quite manage a full season and burn out. This isn’t so much a Little v Gregory thought exercise. It’s more of a musing that perhaps the styles and the personalities of the two were complimentary to each other and was a winning combination that we only experienced briefly despite them both being at the club for a number of years. Think this kind of thing happens a lot in football and in life. You get all these debates over who was the real brains or talent behind something, and it turns out it was the combination of skills and personalities that made it work. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
allani Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 20 minutes ago, KentVillan said: I think it's a bit of a myth that Ferguson just surfed the Sky money wave. He was already one of the best managers in British football on paper, with the Aberdeen record + a couple of English cups under his belt. A team containing Schmeichel, Bruce, Pallister, Irwin, Ince, Cantona, Giggs was always going to win trophies, then throw Beckham, Scholes, Butt, etc. in from the youth setup... I don't think we would have competed in reality, even with more money and more marketing appeal from winning the inaugural title. Most likely we would have just fallen back into being a top 4 or 5 side even if we'd won the league, and Man Utd would have still kicked on and dominated the 90s. We might not have competed directly with Man Utd just on the Sky money - but we might have been better placed for a serious bid from very wealthy owners. Whether Doug would have sold (even knowing that his wealth was never going to allow the type of investment that other owners might have offered) is another matter - but maybe an obscene offer would have persuaded him. I'm not saying that I would have necessarily wanted a Russian oligarch or an oil state to buy us - but with a decent owner it would have given us as good a shot as Arsenal and Spurs to take advantage of the arrival of the Champions League and the big TV deals. We certainly wouldn't have ended up with either Lerner or Xia - although I guess that might also mean that we'd never have ended up with NSWE. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FLVillan Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 39 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said: Recently I’ve been wondering about what would have happened if Gregory had stuck around working with Little. Those two together we have arguably our most successful season in the premier league. Fourth and a cup probably beats finishing second. Gregory leaves early at the start of the following season. We don’t drastically decline, but we certainly don’t improve. The season after things nosedive and Little leaves. Gregory comes back in and the good times roll. For a while it was fantastic but the wheels come off, we can’t quite manage a full season and burn out. This isn’t so much a Little v Gregory thought exercise. It’s more of a musing that perhaps the styles and the personalities of the two were complimentary to each other and was a winning combination that we only experienced briefly despite them both being at the club for a number of years. That coaching team was an ideal mix. Three Villa men in Little, Gregory and Evans - all with very different personalities that combined to get the very best out of the team and give us that edge that only can come from Villa men in charge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevo71 Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 Great thread. Real "Fatherland" vibes with alternate timelines. Can't add much over what's been said, but I always wonder what might've happened had Ellis not returned in '82. Kick on or start to collapse under the accumulating debt? Also if England hadn't come knocking for Sir GT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Villatillidie95 Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 10 hours ago, FLVillan said: First of all, brilliant idea for a thread, and the initial post I would agree with 100%. Especially that Leicester game that propelled them to the title and us to the championship. I have a two games to add, both involving Derby County.... 1990 we sign Cascarino mid-season (terrible purchase because Ellis refused to pay the extra ten quid for Sheringham). Cascarino makes his away debut at the baseball ground and midway through the first half plants a bullet header that was destined for the bottom corner, until a world-class save from Peter Shilton. If that had gone in perhaps his Villa career would have taken off and he'd have scored the goals to get us the title. Instead he was a poor man's Ian Olney and a complete waste of money. 2019 Grealish makes his comeback from injury at home to Derby, having been handed the captaincy by new manager Dean Smith. He scores a worldy in a 4-0 hammering of the Rams to spark a ten-game winning streak and send us into the play-offs. Ironically we would then beat Derby 2-1 in the final to seal promotion and an aggregate score of 9-1 against Fat Frank's Derby in three games that season. I remember that day well, derby were terrible that day! Grealish scored on the stroke of halftime, think there was a mad rush of goals in that first half. It was sad to see what Ashley Cole had become, he was totally spent by that point and playing because he was lampard's mate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoshVilla Posted May 24, 2023 Share Posted May 24, 2023 Not sure if it's been posted here already, but I often wonder what would have happened if we hadn't lost Grealish to injury for nearly a third of the 20/21 season (if I remember correctly, he missed about 12 games?). We finished 11th, but only 7 points off a place in the Europa Conference League (and 10 points off the Europa League). Could we have maybe picked up another 3 or 4 wins if we'd have had Grealish fit all season? Off the back of that, would he have stayed longer, as we'd have qualified for a European competition? Would that have allowed us to attract even more quality players to complement him and make a push at the top 4? Would Smith still have been manager (and would he have been good enough to manage a push at the CL spots?)? Ultimately, everything has worked out very well. Smith struggling, and then Gerrard utterly failing has led to us getting a manager of genuine quality, but it's an interesting "what if". 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted June 6, 2023 VT Supporter Share Posted June 6, 2023 Just think. This was only five years ago. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBlack Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 (edited) On 24/05/2023 at 10:44, Delphinho123 said: The biggest for me in recent times was losing to Fulham in the play offs. It was absolutely the best thing that has happened to this club in the last 5-7 years simply because that Xia would have caused untold damage to the club had we been promoted. He was a fraudster and a con-man. Luckily, we lost, and we have two incredible owners who saved us, brought in a world class manager, and now we’re on the cusp of Europe. Lord only knows where we’d be had we gone up that year in the playoffs under Xia. Absolutely. Whether being in the PL would have allowed Xia to send more of his mysteriously sourced Chinese funds our way or not, we'd have still ended up way worse off than we are now. Either he gets the green light from China to send his money offshore, potentially going the way of blues and their non-declared owners, or Man City and their state backing, as I'm sure his funds were part originating from Chinese government. Or he is still prevented from releasing funds, and we get stuck in limbo treading water with no money and an eventual relegation back to the championship. Absolutely huge blessing, in an even bigger disguise. It really felt like it was a complete disaster at the time. Edited June 6, 2023 by MrBlack 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeyp102 Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 Vidic not being sent off in the cup final. I’m certain we would’ve won that game if that had happened. It would’ve been a deserved trophy under MON and Lerner may not have pulled the plug. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Follyfoot Posted June 6, 2023 VT Supporter Share Posted June 6, 2023 On 24/05/2023 at 11:30, KentVillan said: Think this kind of thing happens a lot in football and in life. You get all these debates over who was the real brains or talent behind something, and it turns out it was the combination of skills and personalities that made it work. Brian Clough and Peter Taylor 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkLillis Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 On 23/05/2023 at 23:01, El-Reacho said: Great thread! Imagine we'd beaten United in that inaugural Premier League season. We were well matched clubs with a very similar history and pedigree. Look where they went to on the back of that title and look where we've been ever since.... with all due respect to the above… Doug was running the show…..we would have gone back to mid-table nothingness quicker than you could say “balance the books” 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sidcow Posted June 6, 2023 VT Supporter Share Posted June 6, 2023 On 24/05/2023 at 08:53, AvfcRigo82 said: Yes, Benito Carbone stands out to me. Ellis wouldn't cough up the extra few quid for his wages. Also, as others have mentioned Luc Nilis. We had managed to get his partner from their PSV days in Giles de Bilde to the club to try reunite the force they were. Sadly, Nilis never recovered. Wasn't Robbie Keane around that time too. He would have seen us kick on big time. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sidcow Posted June 6, 2023 VT Supporter Share Posted June 6, 2023 On 24/05/2023 at 09:57, The_Rev said: I'm not sure I accept this one. It's been talked about to death, mostly because it was the first game back after a hundred days without any football and the entire country was watching but it's importance has been overstated. People like to talk about it as if it were another Aguerooooo! moment when the fact of the matter is that it was in the first half of our 29th game of the season. It had as much of an impact on our points tally than the ref in the Palace game earlier that season having a meltdown and disallowing Henri Lansbury's 90th minute equaliser against Palace because he wanted to book Jack Grealish for diving even though Grealish had passed the ball and assisted the goal. But that wasn't on TV so it got forgotten about. I came away from that game and said to my lad "you watch us get relegated by 1 point this season" That Sheffield Goal was Karma 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GarethRDR Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 Vidic not getting a red in the final because of "the occasion". Phil Dowd should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jono62 Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 4 hours ago, GarethRDR said: Vidic not getting a red in the final because of "the occasion". Phil Dowd should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell. Guaranteed if it had been a Villa player, he would have been sent off. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Made In Aston Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 Maybe Emery turning down Newcastle might prove to be the biggest sliding doors moment in the club's Premier League history. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VillaChris Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 6 hours ago, sidcow said: Wasn't Robbie Keane around that time too. He would have seen us kick on big time. Him running onto Dublin flick ons would've been brilliant at the time. We refused to pay 6m for Robbie Keane and then a year later paid that fee for Bosko Balaban.... No wonder Ellis didn't want to give Gregory any more money after that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Segundo Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 The ref yellow carding Grealish at Palace - Look at his expression. A mixture of glee and smug satisfaction and as if he's going "ha take that you diving bastard, and wotcha gonna do about it". He was determined to book Grealish and didn't care how it happened. The arsehole. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PaulC Posted June 6, 2023 Share Posted June 6, 2023 Many sliding door moments but the biggest for me was Ron Saunders going the season after we won the lesgue . I know we won the European Cup under barton that season but If Saunders had got what he wanted we could have built a dynasty then and been up there with Liverpool 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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