Dan Bardell: Toothless Aston Villa look like worst-coached team in Premier League
We’re delighted to welcome The Athletic’s Dan Bardell as our exclusive Aston Villa columnist each week he’ll be giving his views on the biggest talking points at the club…
Aston Villa are heading for a “relegation dog fight” on current evidence and of all the teams in the Premier League they currently look the worst coached, says Dan Bardell.
The Lions laboured to a 1-1 draw at Steve Cooper’s Nottingham Forest on Monday night (10 October), and are currently just two spots above the relegation zone in 16th, despite a four-game unbeaten run.
But with Steven Gerrard at the helm at Villa Park for almost a year now Bardell doesn’t feel like there has been anywhere near enough in the way of growth on the pitch, which is particularly disappointing considering the all the positive talk during the summer.
On the question of whether the players or the manager are to blame for the malaise, exclusively said to Villa News: “I think it’s probably a bit of both.
“I think Villa going forward at the moment just don’t have an identity at all, which is obviously going to be a problem.
“I watch so much football, and so much Premier League, and at the moment I would say Villa look the worst-coached team in the league.
“There’s just no patterns of play, there’s no identity. They’ve solidified at the back, which they had to do to an extent.
“But when your top goal scorer is about seven or eight players all on one goal that tells you that there’s problems.
“I think in the Leeds game (2 October) Villa were guilty of missing a few chances, but in that Forest game (10 October) they just didn’t make anything happen, an it had taken a wonder goal [from Ashley Young] to get them back in the game.
“Villa are 12 months into Steven Gerrard’s tenure now, and I think fans have the right to think that we should be further along in the process.
“You could point to a couple of injuries but I don’t think that’s an excuse for how poor Villa have been going forward this season.
“There was so much put on preseason, that they’d been working on things, and a new assistant manager had come in, so you expect to see some kind of a difference, but I’ve got a lot of questions of the club at the moment and not a lot of answers.
“It’s just no good going forward. If they continue in that vein then I think we’ll be in a relegation dog fight because they look toothless.”
With the only win in the past two months a scraped 1-0 over 17th-placed Southampton (16 September), while failing to beat then-bottom Forest this week, after a grim goalless draw with 10-man Leeds who themselves are only 14th (2 October) in that time, there aren’t many positive signs right now.
None of the players are in great form, and crucially the former Rangers boss isn’t getting anything out of his top talents in attack.
In many ways it feels like this side is just waiting for a hammering to shatter the illusion that the unbeaten run suggests on paper, so Gerrard is going to have to do something he hasn’t done in some time and come up with some new ideas fast.
In other Aston Villa News, Shay Given blasted Philippe Coutinho for his performance against Forest.