Aston Villa’s Paul Lambert joins 100 club with side still stuck in rut

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/feb/05/aston-villa-paul-lambert

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When Aston Villa welcome Chelsea on Saturday, Paul Lambert will celebrate 100 Premier League games in charge of the Midlands club. The Villa manager admitted he had no idea that he was approaching that milestone, which is probably a good thing, given the record behind the landmark makes for such painful reading.

Villa under Lambert have suffered 48 league defeats, managed less than a goal per game and averaged 1.02 points per match. To put those numbers into context, of those managers to clock up a century of Premier League matches with the same club, only Mick McCarthy had lost more games than Lambert at this juncture. McCarthy was in charge of Wolverhampton Wanderers at the time. He was sacked after match number 101.

As for the goals – or the appalling lack of them – Villa have scored 97 in 99 matches during Lambert’s reign. The only Premier League manager to hang around for 100 matches at the same club averaging less than a goal per game was Roberto Martínez in his previous post, at Wigan Athletic (98 goals). When it comes to the points ratio, irrespective of Saturday’s result against Chelsea, only two men on the list have a worse record than Lambert. You guessed it: McCarthy and Martínez, both of whom were managing clubs that expected to be fighting relegation.

Whether looking at those woeful statistics, the prosaic football that has been served up on the pitch, or the humiliating League Cup and FA Cup exits at the hands of Bradford City, Millwall, Sheffield United and Leyton Orient, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at the majority of Premier League clubs Lambert would have been told to clear his desk long ago. It is almost unprecedented that a manager has stayed in a job so long with such a bad record.

Lambert, however, is seen as bullet-proof. His contract runs until 2018, after he signed a new deal in September, when Villa were second in the table, and there is not the slightest hint of pressure from above. Last week Tom Fox, the club’s chief executive, told the BBC that it was a false narrative to blame the manager.

A dreadful run of results was not, however, in the script when Lambert put pen to paper five months ago. At the time, Lambert made it sound as if the dark days had been consigned to the past. “The bar had to be raised, everyone has stepped up and there will be continued improvement,” he said in the statement. “We can look to the future with real optimism and a determination to make this season successful, and the seasons that follow.”

Villa’s league record since that contract was signed reads: played 19, won two, drawn six, lost 11, scored seven, conceded 29. They have slipped back into their old ways and it is not being wise after the event – there was widespread surprise at the time – to question why Randy Lerner, the Villa owner, erased from his mind the two miserable seasons that had gone before and decided that Lambert, on the back of collecting 10 points from four games at the start of this campaign, should be rewarded with a long-term deal.

It transpires that the rationale for that remarkable show of faith is that Lerner and Fox believed that stability would bring the best out of Lambert. It has not worked out that way and Villa find themselves flirting with relegation for the fifth season running. They are in freefall and, as was pointed out to Lambert in his press conference before the Chelsea game, Villa supporters are genuinely worried that they are heading for the Championship.

“Listen, you don’t need to sit there and tell me. I know,” the Villa manager replied when told of growing relegation fears on the back of his record since September. “But our season won’t be defined by Arsenal [the 5-0 loss last Sunday] and Chelsea. It will be after that we have to get wins. I know we can do it. I’ve spoken to the lads, they believe they can do it.”

The trip to fellow strugglers Hull City on Tuesday night feels like a huge game for both clubs. Yet there is no escaping the biggest concern for Villa: where the hell are the goals going to come from to keep them up? Villa have gone 612 minutes without a top-flight goal – the seventh-longest Premier League drought in history. Joe Cole, who has started only three league games this season, is the only midfielder with a goal to his name. The figures are not much better up front. “That’s why I brought in Carles [Gil] and Scott [Sinclair] to help that side of our game,” Lambert said.

He would have liked to have added Rickie Lambert to his squad as well but the Liverpool striker preferred to remain at Anfield, leaving the Villa manager pinning his hopes on Christian Benteke, who has scored only twice in the league since returning at the start of October from a ruptured achilles.

“I think a fit Christian Benteke, who was right on his game … if he had been performing from when he came back from his injury to now, I’m pretty sure there would have been a long list of clubs knocking the door down for him,” Lambert said. “The big guy has had a dip of form, which I think he realises. But he’s still a big talent. He’s human like everyone else, you can’t rest everything on his shoulders every time. It’s something we’re working hard on, as staff and players, to get him back to what we know he can do.”

Benteke, at £7m, remains Lambert’s record signing at Villa and, as such, highlights the constraints the Scot has been working under compared to his predecessors. In recent years, Lerner has been more interested in selling up than chasing European football, although the danger is that he will end up with a Championship club on his hands. Villa introduced relegation clauses across the board a few years ago but the financial pain would still be considerable if they lost their Premier League status.

Lambert has tried everything to turn things around during his three seasons at the club. He has swayed from recruiting younger players to targeting those with experience, changed his backroom staff – albeit enforced – and introduced a new style of play based on a possession game. The results, however, have not got any better; the goal return has got worse. All of which means that there is little to get excited about when the Villa manager joins the hundred club against Chelsea.