MON's signings how do you rate them?

[Mantis]

You're also forgetting that Dunne has been very poor in the two seasons since he was voted into the Premier League team of the year.

Managers sign players to play for them not for other people.

Not his fault houllier and Mcleish couldn't get the best from him.

Dunne's poor form over the last two seasons can't be blamed on Houllier and McLeish alone. Even in his first season he was prone to silly mistakes.

If then, going by your logic, we're only allowed to rate MON signings based on how they played for him, how come you have no issue with Downing rated as good? After all, it wasn't until his second season here (after MON left) that he actually came good.

[markavfc40]

Judging the players on what they did under the man that signed them I'd say this. For the approx 27mill spent on assembling the back 5 of Friedel, Cuellar, Dunne, Collins, Warnock in there full season as a unit under the man that brought them they performed excellently and looked well worth the money. Following his departure on the whole they have not looked the same as much down to poor management as loss of form.

As for the rest

Waste of money - Davies, Sidwell, Beye, Shorey, Harewood

Hit and miss - Reo Coker ( paid 3 mill too much ), Maloney, Heskey, Carson

Did Well - Knight, Luke Young, Brad Guzan, John Carew

Excellent Signings - Petrov, Milner, Ash Young, Downing

The jury is still out on Delph for me but this is now a massive season for him.

The rest were just short term signings or cost peanuts and not worth commenting on.

[AVFCforever1991]

what about Warnock?

[Mantis]

Judging the players on what they did under the man that signed them I'd say this. For the approx 27mill spent on assembling the back 5 of Friedel, Cuellar, Dunne, Collins, Warnock in there full season as a unit under the man that brought them they performed excellently and looked well worth the money. Following his departure on the whole they have not looked the same as much down to poor management as loss of form.

As for the rest

Waste of money - Davies, Sidwell, Beye, Shorey, Harewood

Hit and miss - Reo Coker ( paid 3 mill too much ), Maloney, Heskey, Carson

Did Well - Knight, Luke Young, Brad Guzan, John Carew

Excellent Signings - Petrov, Milner, Ash Young, Downing

The jury is still out on Delph for me but this is now a massive season for him.

The rest were just short term signings or cost peanuts and not worth commenting on.

How can you call Downing an excellent signing? He wasn't even that good under MON.

Double standards much?

[Zatman]

agree DOwning was average in his 1st season and played like a wimp

[PieFacE]

Hit and miss - Reo Coker ( paid 3 mill too much ), Maloney, Heskey, Carson

:shock:

I must have missed the hits from these players.

I can think of two games where NRC stood out. Liverpool away and Man UTD at home.

Heskey? That was a complete shocker from day one. When you take into account the wages he's on too.

Maloney? Again, I can think of one or two games where he was decent, Chelsea away was one of them.

[briny_ear]

I think Sidwell was actually a case where MON bought him but didn't get the best out of him. He 's been decent enough since he went to Fulham.

[Zatman]

cant say ive actually noticed anything he does while he is at Fulham, most Fulham games ive saw he hasnt been near squad though might be injured.

wasnt worse player we had but his salary was ridiculous. got into right positions just couldnt finish chances

[briny_ear]

Pretty much an ever-present in Fulham's side last season until February when he got a hernia injury.

[bickster]

He wasn't even that good under MON.

Double standards much?

Depends if you are judging him purely on the time MON was manager or his overall contribution to Villa. Overall he was a great signing, his second season imo he was our best player, not only that but we turned a profit on him. Even better than that he went to a competitor and turned back to useless again

What's not to like?

[ozvillafan]

MON's transfer dealings were unsurpsingly similar to other managers. Some good, some not so good.

The things that annoyed me about his transfer dealings were:

a) He appeared to favour British players,

He payed over the odds for his targets (transfer amount, wages or both), and

c) He didn't utilise all of the players he bought.

[markavfc40]

He wasn't even that good under MON.

Double standards much?

Depends if you are judging him purely on the time MON was manager or his overall contribution to Villa. Overall he was a great signing, his second season imo he was our best player, not only that but we turned a profit on him. Even better than that he went to a competitor and turned back to useless again

What's not to like?

Sums him up nicely. I thought he did pretty well for us in his first season as well especially when you consider he had a broken foot when we signed him and missed the start of the season so it was always going to take a while for him to get up to speed.

He still finished that season with 6 assists and 3 goals.

[Mantis]

He wasn't even that good under MON.

Double standards much?

Depends if you are judging him purely on the time MON was manager or his overall contribution to Villa. Overall he was a great signing, his second season imo he was our best player, not only that but we turned a profit on him. Even better than that he went to a competitor and turned back to useless again

What's not to like?

Definitely, but Mark was judging players only on their time under O'Neill. Overall Downing was an excellent signing, but if we're talking only about his time under MON (which is what Mark was doing) then he was nowhere near an excellent signing.

If Downing was an excellent signing (and he was) then Warnock, Collins and Dunne certainly were not excellent signings. Quite the opposite.

[HolteExile]

This debate really does go round and round in circles.

When you look at the money we spent in comparison to those we were competing with we never got close. The Net figure is very deceptive because we had bugger all to sell. If you look at Spurs over the same period whilst their Net spending was lower than ours they spent almost double gross, just happened they managed to make a lot of money out of the Carrick, Berbatov and Keane sales. During that time Arsenal weren't spending big on transfer fees but were stil paying higher wages (on average) and still had the draw of CL football.

We on the other hand had to pick ourselves up from one of our worst PL finishes, being a club that last won something in 96, we were never going to go out and attract the better players from day one unless we had the resources to pull a city and throw £150k a week wages and the dream of something special at players.

If he was signing the likes of Harewood and Routlede iin his last season then I'd have been up in arms, but realistically even with money to spend we had a damaged reputation to repair before we could attract a higher calibre of player.

The issue of wages wil come up time and time again, again in comparison to the other clubs around us when we were pushing for 4th place and trophies we weren't paying significantly higher than anybody and when you look at the previous sky4 and city we were still well behind. The major issue was wages as a proportion of income, and therein lies the major flaw in the Lerner/MoN model, even in the height of MoN 'glory days' income was not growing at a fast enough rate to support the expenditure.

As much as it stings me to say but I honestly believe we've missed that train, if we'd have hung onto Utd's coat tails the season we finished 2nd behind them then we could be an established top 4 club, but now the markets have been tapped, the early days of the CL was the time to gamble and the foreign markets are now saturated with Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool fans.

What MoN pehaps could have done, and something Lambert has realised he needs to do is tap into the foreign markets where transfer fees and wage demands are generally (not always) lower. It can be successfull as Newcastle proved last season but it is a higher risk strategy, look at the players like Makoun or even worse examples from our history like Balaban. It is much better imo to add a few foreign players to an established core than it is to rely almost entirely on relatively unproven foreign players hitting the ground running.

The final thing I will say is it's easy for us to look back and say we should have signed player A instead of player B, or surely player C was available at price X, but in reality we do not know what enquiries were made, what players were approached and what players turned us down. What we can measure is results, points, goals scored and goals conceeded and league position, and ultimately whether you agree with his method or not MoN delivered a decent return on the money he spent. Finishing in the top 4 woud have been overachieving, I think, and finishing below the Euro spots would have been under achieving.

This is an excellent post. You are spot on in everything you say.

Excellent apart from one slight oversight.

We signed Stan Petrov in 2006 (supposedly when we were woefully unattractive to most half decent players) and had no problem at all in attracting a 'name' like John Carew in 2007. We also faced competition from Tottingham for the likes of Ash and Curtis Davies yet- despite being so unattractive a proposition- they opted for us. Weird, eh?

So actually, no, that analysis doesn't tally with the facts at all, I'm afraid.

But it is consistent with the curious mindset and low opinion some of our own fans have about the club and it's standing in the game.

At a time when MON was signing the likes of Harweood and Routledge, heavy hitters like West Ham and Blakburn were signing the likes of Bellamy, Parker and RSC. Is the appeal of those clubs genuinely greater than ours?

[briny_ear]

Excellent apart from one slight oversight.

We signed Stan Petrov in 2006 (supposedly when we were woefully unattractive to most half decent players) and had no problem at all in attracting a 'name' like John Carew in 2007. We also faced competition from Tottingham for the likes of Ash and Curtis Davies yet- despite being so unattractive a proposition- they opted for us. Weird, eh?

So actually, no, that analysis doesn't tally with the facts at all, I'm afraid.

But it is consistent with the curious mindset and low opinion some of our own fans have about the club and it's standing in the game.

At a time when MON was signing the likes of Harweood and Routledge, heavy hitters like West Ham and Blakburn were signing the likes of Bellamy, Parker and RSC. Is the appeal of those clubs genuinely greater than ours?

I doubt very much whether you have set out all the relevant facts about these transfers. For example, it's worth remembering that, at the time of Bellamy's transfer to West ham he was fondly known as "the nutter with the putter" after his unconventional approach to the use of John Arne Riise's head as a golf ball. So he might not have seemed a great squad member and I seem to recall that West ham were seen as taking a considerable risk. Scott Parker was illness and injury prone in the season before he went to West Ham. And so on.

In any case, it was reported that MON was trying to sign Parker a couple of seasons later and one account has it that the refusal to pay £6m for him was the trigger for MON to resign.

[HolteExile]

Those were individual names to highlight the point.

Very rarely have either of those clubs been seen as a more attractive option than Villa to most neutrals.

I readily accept that we don't know the individual reasons behind players having a preference or choosing one club over t' other.

Do you accept that there were infinitely better options out there than Harewood, Routledge and co?

Even before MON joined, as a club we had a suitably high enough profile to sign coveted players like Baros, Berger and Freddie Bouma. Are we to believe that with a new billionaire owner and a new, popular big name manager our appeal actually nosedived to such an extend that Marlon F Harewoood and Wayne Routledge were the only realistic options? :?

[Mantis]

If we can sign Darren Bent while sitting in the relegation zone and with a supposedly shit manager then we could've easily signed him a couple of years before. But no, instead we got Heskey.

[Big_John_10]

If we can sign Darren Bent while sitting in the relegation zone and with a supposedly shit manager then we could've easily signed him a couple of years before. But no, instead we got Heskey.

Really? I thought you didn't agree with speculation without knowing all the details.

How much was Lerner willing to give Mon during that transfer window? How was Bent's feeling towards us and Sunderland during that period?

[BG_Villa_Fan]

If we can sign Darren Bent while sitting in the relegation zone and with a supposedly shit manager then we could've easily signed him a couple of years before. But no, instead we got Heskey.

Now, that could be a wild speculation on my part, but I kind of doubt Bent was available for 3 mil at the time.

[Mantis]

If we can sign Darren Bent while sitting in the relegation zone and with a supposedly shit manager then we could've easily signed him a couple of years before. But no, instead we got Heskey.

Really? I thought you didn't agree with speculation without knowing all the details.

How much was Lerner willing to give Mon during that transfer window? How was Bent's feeling towards us and Sunderland during that period?

I'm just using logic. If Bent was willing to come to us in January 2011 (bearing in mind the situation we were in) I'm pretty certain he'd come to us in January 2009, especially given how he was doing at Spurs and how well we were doing).

If we can sign Darren Bent while sitting in the relegation zone and with a supposedly shit manager then we could've easily signed him a couple of years before. But no, instead we got Heskey.

Now, that could be a wild speculation on my part, but I kind of doubt Bent was available for 3 mil at the time.

I never said he would've cost £3m, but I'm pretty sure that at that moment in time if MON had asked to buy Bent instead of Heskey Lerner would've backed him.