Amid the cacophony surrounding Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s future, or apparent lack thereof, as Manchester United manager, chatter regarding his Aston Villa counterpart, Dean Smith, has barely registered on the football decibel scale. Speculating on the bookmakers’ sack race market might seem ghoulish but a small investment on Smith being handed his P45 before the white-hot Norwegian favourite may not constitute the world’s worst wager at double-digit odds.
His team go into Sunday’s home game against in-form West Ham on the back of three successive defeats, the most recent a surprisingly feeble capitulation at Arsenal. Despite taking the scalps of Newcastle, Everton and Manchester United this season, it has been reported that Villa’s position of 13th in the Premier League does not come close to matching the expectations of the chief executive, Christian Purslow, or his billionaire bosses, Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens.
This was always going to be a difficult campaign for Smith as he got to grips with life after the departure of Jack Grealish. Villa won only three of the 12 Premier League games they played last season without their talisman and most gifted creator and his summer exit was inevitably going to be felt keenly despite the club hierarchy’s commendable efforts to replace him.
In a frank, forthright and widely praised video address to Villa fans after Grealish’s transfer to Manchester City, Purslow explained the background to the deal and said Villa had tried to replace the qualities – creativity, goals and assists – of their former captain by signing three forwards in Emi Buendía, Danny Ings and Leon Bailey. Nine games into the season, with Grealish looking as at home in the City ranks as he did at Villa, Smith’s side have yet to gel or get motoring with any kind of consistency.
In his address Purslow said “it was never our intention to replace Jack with one footballer”, a statement that made sense but didn’t touch on the structural difficulties the club would encounter in trying to crowbar the three newcomers into a team still allowed to field only 11 players. It was left to Smith and his staff to find a solution to that dilemma and the manager’s task was not made easier by the summer departure of John Terry and Richard O’Kelly, two key members of his backroom team.
In order to get Ings and his fellow striker Ollie Watkins into his starting lineup, Smith changed from his favoured 4-3-3 to 3-5-2, employing wing-backs instead of wingers. The switch also forced him to move Buendía from his favoured wide-right position to a playmaking role behind the front two at the tip of a midfield triangle with John McGinn and Douglas Luiz. To say the Argentinian has not yet adapted would be putting it mildly.
Buendía was voted player of the season in the Championship with Norwich in 2020-21, scoring 15 goals and providing 17 assists playing on the right of a front three, but at Villa he has managed one full 90 minutes, one goal and no assists in seven league appearances. In mitigation, he is reported to have been struggling with a nagging hip injury and sat out matches against Chelsea and Everton while in (or just out of) quarantine after a controversial and ultimately futile trip to Brazil with Argentina. Tellingly, Buendía’s best Villa performance came when he played on the right of a front three after Smith switched formation during their draw with Brentford.
Although injuries have restricted Bailey to four substitute appearances, it is difficult to see where the left winger would fit into Smith’s current lineup, and his fellow wide player Anwar El Ghazi is believed to be surplus requirements and may be moved on in January.
Smith is a likable, decent man who is Villa through and through but while he will always retain fans’ affection and respect for getting them promoted ahead of schedule in 2019, three consecutive defeats have prompted concern in the stands and – if local reporters are to be believed – the first signs of itchy trigger fingers in the boardroom.
A sluggish performance in defeat against Tottenham was followed by a calamitous final 10 minutes at home to local rivals Wolves in which they threw away a two-goal lead, and the meek surrender against Arsenal. They host a West Ham side dealing more than capably with the demands of action on the domestic and European front during a season in which many thought they might struggle.
Smith has done more than enough excellent work at Villa to buy himself time to avert the mini-crisis but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that defeat by West Ham could have serious repercussions for his future. His employers have lofty ambitions and did not accumulate the vast combined wealth that makes them the fourth-richest owners in the Premier League by trading in misty-eyed sentiment or nostalgia.
