It may not be the precise words spoken by John Terry to new Aston Villa manager Dean Smith when first officially introduced, but it may have been something similar. To many outside the club’s inner sanctum of decision makers, it seemed the sort of appointment ‘shoehorned’ into a scenario that it may not best serve, merely for the ease of PR marketing.
When the club was relegated from the Premier League after the 2015-16 season, many pundits expected a quick return for the Birmingham club after a few years of trials and tribulations struggling in the Premier League. A number of their fans may also have expected a decent haul of morale-boosting victories as they scampered through the Championship fixture list on the way back to their ‘rightful’ place in English football’s top echelon.
In the close season, Randy Lerner disposed of the club for some £76million as Tony Xia moved in and appointed Roberto di Matteo as manager. It lasted only a dozen games though, before the ‘promotion expert’ Steve Bruce took over. Two years later, as promotion attempts have been stymied, and a cash crisis seemingly averted, the Championship no longer looks the carefree canter through the fields that Villa fans were expecting. It now looks like the ‘gluepot’ of a division filled with something of the order of a dozen clubs, each with broadly similar squads who, on any given day, can beat any other club. Getting promotion out of there is no easy task. If in any doubt, they only need to pop across to West Midlands neighbours Wolves, who struggled to loosen the division’s grasp on them until Fosen’s big bucks and a few of George Mendes’ charges cut them free.
It’s perhaps not surprising now then, that with more new owners in place at the club, the ‘Quick Fix’ option of Bruce has been jettisoned and a manager with a proven record of building clubs and developing talent has been brought in to do a more considered job. All that seems to make eminent sense, until you then look at the appointment of John Terry as Smith’s assistant. When talk was floated of Thierry Henry and Terry being appointed as a team, it was perhaps a charisma ‘ticket’ and certainly not one boasting of experience. There was however, no incumbent baggage coming along with Henry as the main man. He hadn’t worked successfully anywhere else as the main man with a different assistant and therefore there was no established boat to rock. That isn’t the case with Dean Smith however.
A life-long Villa fan, Smith was born just a few miles from Villa Park in West Bromwich and served his managerial apprenticeship at Walsall, before moving up a division to take over at Brentford, and it’s his success there that has prompted Villa to come a-calling. Whilst the parting with Brentford has been refreshingly amicable, the fate of Smith’s ‘backroom team’ is yet to be confirmed. It’s to be assumed that, unless one of his team aspires to the ‘big chair’ at Brentford, the default scenario would be for them to follow Smith to Villa Park. This then poses the question, whither then John Terry?
Love him or hate him and so many football fans fall into one camp or the other – there seems little middle ground – it’s unlikely that the former Chelsea captain, where he was such a dominant influence, would be happy with a mere sinecure position, offered to placate fans who had no knowledge of the man at the ‘top of the ticket’ and craved a ‘big name’ appointment. Instead Aston Villa need to focus on signings on the field, buying former player James Milner would be a shrewd move but that’s unlikely to happen now.
Time, and especially results, will tell of the success of the appointments, but if things do not pan out well early on, there’s every likelihood that one or the other of the new management team may not still be in place by the end of the season. Seeking to take a successful manager from a club, and then forcing a change in his backroom staff, may turn out to be a dangerous and costly folly.
