When Steve Bruce is asked whether work on strengthening the team will start immediately if Aston Villa win promotion to the Premier League on Saturday, the first thought that comes into his head has nothing to do with new signings. “The one thing I need this year, more than any other year, is a holiday,” he says.
The Championship can be a grind at the best of times with all those Saturday-Tuesday fixtures and all the more so when a 46-game season is extended by another three weeks because of the play-offs, but Bruce is looking forward to a break for reasons that transcend football.
This has been a devastating year for the Villa manager, who lost his father, Joe, in February and his mother, Sheenagh, less than three months later. The pain and grief are never far from the surface but Bruce, somehow, has managed to carry on working, trying as best he can to lose himself in the job while also taking solace from the heart-warming response he has received from inside football.
“You know something?” he says. “In the industry we’re in, there is so much negativity and so-called bad people around everywhere, and when something happens like what’s happened to me, with how cruel it is, then the number of messages of support and cards I’ve had has been quite remarkable. The football world then feels for you because to lose your mum and dad in a matter of 12 weeks has been the most traumatic experience that anybody could cope with.”
Bruce pauses for a moment, puffs out his cheeks and carries on. “On a lighter note, my mum always enjoyed Wembley, so she would have been getting her outfit,” he adds, smiling. “She loved Wembley. My dad wouldn’t have gone. He’d have said: ‘I can’t stand all that crap, Steve. I don’t know how you do all that and stand there, I couldn’t do that for the life of me.’ But my mum was a total one-off and my biggest supporter, and she was terrific.”
It is extremely moving listening to Bruce and not surprising to hear him say that, in the context of what he has been through over the last few months, winning promotion with Villa would be the most satisfying achievement of his managerial career.
In truth, it has been a difficult assignment at Villa from day one. Appointed in October 2016, when Villa were 19th in the Championship, Bruce remembers sitting down with Steve Round, the technical director, after his first game and having a brutally honest conversation about the state of the club. “My initial thought, and Steve agreed with me, was: ‘Steve, we’ve got to stop the rot here and just keep the club in the Championship.’ That’s how low I thought it had got.”
Years of failure had taken their toll. “There was no association with the players [and the fans] any more, it had broken,” Bruce says. “So to try and mend that, the only thing you can do is try and get a bit of honesty and endeavour back and win a few matches. I do believe the supporters have enjoyed seeing what we have got at the moment. It has taken some time and certainly wasn’t there when I arrived. There were times when they wanted to rip my head off and rip the heads off the players.”
Bruce recruited experienced campaigners to turn things around, including Glenn Whelan, Ahmed Elmohamady, John Terry and Mile Jedinak, all of whom “could handle playing for Aston Villa”, and also made the most of the loan market by adding Robert Snodgrass, Josh Onomah, Sam Johnstone and Lewis Grabban.
Yet the player he “practically tried to build a team around” was already at the club. Jack Grealish, who burst on to the scene in an FA Cup semi-final against Liverpool three years ago, has been outstanding in the second half of the season, so much so that Bruce thought the 22-year-old had an outside chance of making England’s World Cup squad. “He’s got that ability to get you off your seat and go ‘wow’, which is quite unique in this country,” Bruce says.
He hopes Grealish will give Villa “another year whatever league we are in”, but no one inside the club is under any illusions about the ramifications of defeat against Fulham. “There will be difficult times ahead, I would have thought,” says Bruce, alluding to concerns about the potential financial fallout.
For Bruce, however, it is all about thinking positively, which has not always been easy over the last few months. The 57-year-old, who is chasing a fifth promotion to the top flight, deserves a break in more ways than one, and few outside Fulham will begrudge him if he heads off on holiday as a Premier League manager once again.
