Time for O'Neill to deliver for Villa

When will Martin O’Neill impose himself in the Premier League? He has been in charge of Aston Villa for a year but has not managed to dispel the grey cloud that has hung over Villa Park for more than a decade.

A home match against Liverpool, in front of a full house, should have started the season with a bang. However, neither the players nor the Holte End seemed to have the belief that the game could end in a home victory.

The mood and performance were flat. This is a club that should have pretensions to crash the big four’s party; a club with more European Cups than Arsenal and Chelsea and a fanbase that warrants respect.

As the Premier League era has rumbled on, Villa have faded into the background. In 1992-93, they finished second in the table and were in the title hunt in April. The next season they beat Manchester United in the League Cup final at Wembley. In 1995 they opened the campaign with a famous 3-1 victory over United at Villa Park, the one that prompted Alan Hansen to issue his notorious “you don’t win things with kids” proclamation. The title would eventually go to Old Trafford but things were not too bad in 96. Villa finished fourth and won the League Cup again.

And that was the last time Aston Villa beat Manchester United (no one, even Villa fans, can count the 3-0 League Cup win in 1999 against a United team that contained great Old Trafford names like Bosnich, Curtis, Clegg, Twiss and Wellens).

Since the start of the 2004-05 season, Villa’s record against the so-called big four - Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and United — is horrible. They have played 27 times, lost 19 and drawn 8. Victories? Do the maths. They have lost all seven games against United in that time.

But this is not an attack on Villa and O’Neill. This is a symptom of a wider malaise in the game which needs to be addressed. Over the past 10 years it has become commonplace for managers to play down expectations. “Forty points and safety is our target,” has been the mission statement of so many managers in the top flight that we accept it without burning our season tickets. “We can’t compete with the rich clubs,” they say. “We need to stay in the Premier League.”

Right from the off, supporters are led to believe that the aim for a season is avoiding relegation. What other business would spend time convincing its customers to expect the bare minimum? And what foolish customers would accept it?

So we have teams like Wigan Athletic and Bolton Wanderers putting out weakened teams in the FA Cup. Forget the day out at Wembley, forget glory, it’s all about the money. Forget the title, forget European competition, scraping past the trapdoor is enough.

Managers don’t have to achieve, they just have to survive. And, if you hear it often enough, you start to believe survival is achievement.

It’s not.

The sad thing is that a generation of players has come into the game and heard this flawed canard repeated as truth. They appear to have accepted it. They play without conviction. Let’s pick up the points against, say, Middlesbrough, because we can’t beat the big boys.

This sort of logic keeps inept managers in jobs and chairmen in the black. But it will drive supporters away from the game.

At the highest level, there is a hair’s breadth in terms of ability between the majority of players. The golden few — the Gerrards, the Rooneys and Ronaldos — stand out, but the rest are of a similar standard. A good manager will blend these ‘ordinary’ players, organise them and motivate them, using his talents to make his team better than their opponents. If you have the money to buy stardust to add to this, all well and good, but there’s not that much stardust about.

But to be successful in lifting his team above the crowd, the man in the hot seat needs to make the players in his charge believe they can compete. That they can be winners.

It is in this area that O’Neill excels. Which is why everyone expected him to improve Villa. But the team that played against Liverpool had no belief that they could come out on top, no conviction and no appetite for the battle. I suspect they were beaten by the notion that they can’t compete against the big clubs’ spending.

Much has been made of Villa’s inability to bring in players during this transfer window but is that the real problem? Are the type of players likely to sign for the club already burdened by the suspicion that they can’t play with the big four?

You can’t buy belief. It has to be built and there are few signs that it is growing at Villa Park. Can O’Neill sell the modern player the idea that he can be a winner? I hope so. Because if he can’t, I don’t know who can.