Even an owner as detached as Randy Lerner has a breaking point. That moment came on Tuesday evening at Hull City when Aston Villa suffered a 2-0 defeat that sent the Midlands club into the relegation zone and prompted renewed calls for Paul Lambert to be put out of his misery. Less than 24 hours later a statement went up on the Villa website confirming that a man who set records for all the wrong reasons had been issued with his P45.
Hull was the tipping point, a step too far even for Lerner, a man who has cut Lambert more than enough slack over the best part of three miserable years in charge. A £5.1bn television deal is sitting on the table and Villa cannot contemplate the thought of having their noses pressed up against the window in 18 months’ time when the rest of the Premier League clubs are clinking champagne glasses.
So much for the “false narrative” that Tom Fox talked about a couple of weeks ago, when the Villa chief executive said that it was wrong to blame the manager. Another three league defeats, the sight of Villa in the bottom three, growing supporter unrest, mounting relegation fears and enough damning statistics to fill a book led to a shift in opinion. The penny dropped. Villa were sleepwalking towards the Championship.
In the end the evidence against Lambert was impossible to ignore and it would not be surprising if the decision came as some sort of relief to the former Norwich City manager. He looked drained and at a loss as to what to do next to arrest that appalling run of results – two wins from 21 league matches since Villa made the decision in September to reward him with an extended contract until 2018.
José Mourinho rattled his cage on Saturday, when the Chelsea manager talked up the quality of the players in the Villa squad to the point that it was hard to escape the feeling that the Portuguese, who has some history with Lambert, was trying to highlight the fact that the man in charge was to blame for the club’s position. “Maybe he is trying to put pressure on me,” Lambert said.
Mourinho hit a nerve and had a point. Lambert never had the money to spend that some of his predecessors at Villa enjoyed and his supporters – and there were some – will highlight the constraints he was operating within compared with other Premier League managers. Villa, though, do not pay peanuts and the bottom line – as Mourinho suggested – is that the group of players at Lambert’s disposal should be capable of scoring more than 12 Premier League goals in 25 matches and fighting for their lives to stay up.
Lambert had no solution and gave the impression of a man who was going round in circles. He started his reign signing young and hungry players and finished it bringing in old heads. The playing style went from counter-attacking to dominating possession. All the while the results never got better, the goal return got worse and the supporters, inevitably, started to turn against him in increasing numbers.
Lerner will be criticised for failing to support Lambert financially but he showed tremendous faith in other respects. There were times in Lambert’s first two years when he could easily have been dismissed. The League Cup semi-final defeat in 2013 against Bradford City, who were in League Two at the time, was humiliating. Millwall knocked Villa out of the FA Cup a few days later. Sheffield United did the same thing the following year. Lerner, however, made it clear within the club that Lambert’s position was not even up for discussion in either of those seasons, both of which ended with Villa scrapping at the wrong end of the table.
Lerner did not believe the manager’s future would be on the agenda this season when Villa sat second in the table with 10 points from four matches but everything quickly unravelled and left a man who wants to sell up looking at the prospect of having a Championship club on his hands.
