Aston Villa left with few options over managerial vacancy after Lambert’s exit
Version 0 of 1. The vacancy, which can be found halfway down the page, sandwiched between the opportunity to become commercial manager for the Williams Formula One team and chief executive for the Rugby League International Federation, provides one of the reasons why Aston Villa’s search for a new manager is more problematic than it might otherwise have been. The job title on the Nolan Partners recruitment consultants’ website says: director of football operations – Aston Villa Football Club. Exactly what the position involves in terms of wider responsibilities is unclear – some who claim to have inside knowledge have reservations about whether the job will give the person who is appointed the chance to really influence key areas at the club. There is, however, no escaping the fact that Tom Fox’s search for a replacement for Paul Lambert would be a great deal easier if the chief executive was working alongside an established director of football who had spent the past few months succession-planning with this moment in mind. Unfortunately for Fox and Villa, the post has not long been advertised let alone filled. It remains something of a mystery as to why Randy Lerner has never sought to address the need for this sort of role in the past nor recognised the benefits of employing someone with genuine football expertise who is able to provide a bridge between the manager and the board and, in the process, reduce the risk of the sort of flawed decision-making that has been a feature of his nine years as owner at Villa Park. When Steve McClaren was approached about becoming the Villa manager in 2011 only for Lerner to pull out of interviewing him at the 11th hour because of the backlash from supporters in relation to all that “wally with the brolly” nonsense, there was every chance that Dan Ashworth could have been tempted across the city from his post as technical director at West Bromwich Albion to work alongside the former England coach. Instead Lerner panicked, Villa ended up with Alex McLeish as manager and the rest – a demoralising season spent flirting with relegation and yet more work for the club’s legal advisers at the end of the campaign when the Scot’s contract was terminated – is history and best forgotten. McClaren, for the record, has no intention of riding to Villa’s rescue now and, quite frankly, who can blame him with Derby County thriving under his watch. The biggest problem facing Fox, who joined Villa from Arsenal in the summer, is that there is not exactly an inspiring list of candidates out there to choose from, especially if the club wants to make an appointment with the long term in mind – which is their preferred option, despite timescales and circumstances being against them. Aitor Karanka, at Middlesbrough, Eddie Howe, at Bournemouth, and McClaren are all catching the eye with their work in the Championship this season and fit the sort of profile Villa have drawn up for their manager, yet it is hard to imagine any of that trio swapping a promotion assault for a relegation battle, not least when there is no scope to add to the squad. That managerial landscape could look rather different in the summer if a firefighter is employed on a short-term, heavily incentivised deal and succeeds in keeping Villa up. But who is that person? The candidate would almost certainly need to be out of work and, once again, there are not many options out there. Tim Sherwood remains the frontrunner with the bookmakers – a sentence that seemingly can be copied and pasted whenever any vacancy crops up in the Premier League these days – although in the eyes of some in the game, the former Tottenham Hotspur manager’s position has been severely weakened in the wake of Chris Ramsey’s decision to take the Queens Park Rangers job until the end of the season. Ramsey was the coach in that partnership. It is, in short, a major test for Fox, who was extremely highly regarded at Arsenal, where he was the driving force behind multimillion-pound business deals across the world in his role as the club’s chief commercial officer, but this is a man who has never before found himself in the position of appointing a football manager. Fox will lean heavily on Paddy Reilly, who returned to Villa in November to become director of recruitment after a spell at Liverpool. Reilly would ordinarily be spending his time identifying players and overseeing scouting – the word inside the club is that he was the man who identified Christian Benteke and kept pushing for the Belgian to be signed from Genk back in 2012 – but he has now emerged as a hugely influential figure when it comes to identifying Lambert’s replacement. For everyone involved at the Midlands club the stakes could not be higher. Villa are 18th in the table, in freefall on the back of a run of only two wins from their past 21 league matches and staring at the sobering prospect of dropping out of the top flight for the first time since 1987 – with all the financial pain that would entail. Few would dispute that Lambert had to go but, as Steve Stride, Villa’s respected former operations director, said on Twitter in the wake of the Scot’s dismissal: “That’s the easy part of the process. Now for the difficult bit.” |