Reasons to be Cheerful?

The off-season for me is usually a period of blissful optimism.  Back in the Roy Evans era I would regularly check the gossip line headlines on teletext several times a day anxiously waiting for the “£10million superstar linked” rumour to turn into a new signing.  Last season it was message boards and transfer rumour blogs, but the feeling was the same.  That excitement that comes with new signings and the blind faith that this time it will be your season.

This year, however, it’s really hard to know what to think. 

Ugly Stuff

I’m not enjoying this at all. Garry Barry has always seemed like a decent bloke, a hard-working and honest player. I’ve long had a soft spot for the Villa, through family and later friend-based connections. And they’ve usually been a club with whom we’ve had a good relationship – mutual appreciation of Steve Staunton, mutual dislike of Stan Collymore, that kind of thing. So to see all of that soured by the summer’s ugliest transfer saga is not pleasant in the slightest.

Not least because… well… do we actually need the guy? At that kind of money? If he’d genuinely been available for the £12m or so that we first came in with (and you have to bear in mind that despite his ethereal value to Villa as a talisman and club captain, he’s a 27-year-old with no European experience and a solitary year left on his contract), then yes – good signing. But £18m really is taking the piss. Sadly, the only realistic outcome of this situation is that we do eventually sign him for that fee. His position at Villa is just about untenable, and nobody else is showing signs of coming in for him. So we’ll spend five or six million quid too much on the guy, and be short of cash with which to strengthen areas of genuine need. I would much, much rather see us spend the roughly twenty-to-thirty million we’re likely to have left on David Silva and, at a pinch, Robbie Keane (if Crouchy does end up making the move, to Portsmouth or elsewhere) – and keep Xabi.

Meanwhile, relations with Martin O’Neill (a man who I’m sure many of us wouldn’t have minded seeing in our own dugout some years in the future) and one of the Premier League’s few genuinely likeable clubs appear to have been irrevocably damaged. Not to mention our own reputation – and for all that United and Chelsea fans might want to have a pop at the “whinging Scousers” on the F365 letters page and so on, we’re usually above this kind of thing. This is supposed to be the summer in which everyone unites to laugh at Ronaldo shafting the club that made him – we’re not supposed to be involved in something similar…