Are you for real?
Villa put too much trust in O'Neill. O'Neill's idea of a transfer policy is that you have no scouting network (genuinely, that's not an exaggeration, we didn't have any), and that you buy only from the home market.
He bought 30 odd players at Villa. The number who weren't playing already in the UK? Two. And one of those only happened because Lyon got on the blower and offered him to us.
MON will only work somewhere where he's the undisputed power - on and off the pitch. That's why Quinn has been shunted away. At Villa, MON worked with three chief executives - Richard FitzGerald, Michael Cunnah and Paul Faulkner.
The first two left because they found MON impossible to work with. the final one was the one who told him he had to do something about the wage bill. He refused, hoping he'd win again, only not to, as he was up against one of Lerner's closest advisors.
So what did he do? He threw his toys out of the pram and left, *five days* before the start of the season. That screwed up last season for us, and if you want an indicator of where his fucking shameful transfer policy left us, look at the logic in buying an enitre defence in 2008-09 (Friedel. Shorey. Curtis Davies, Cuellar, Luke Young - who he could have had for 2m the year before, but waited and paid 5m for) then, deciding he didn't rate them almost immediately, going out the next season and buying ANOTHER entire defence (Beye, Warnock, Collins, Dunne).
You can point at Ashley Young and say he was a good signing (he was), and Milner was superb for us, but as he'd already spent a year with us before, that one was hardly earth shattering in terms of him scouting out a gem.
When he left, he left us with a wage bill that was 88% of our turnover, and at that point I think we had the sixth or seventh highest turnover in the league - so go figure that one out.
That's why we've had Habib Beye here for three whole years, now aged 35, picking up 40k a week. Thats why we bought Curtis Davies for 10 million pounds - think about it, ten million pounds - only to see him fail and be moved on to Blues for a pittance.
That's also why we're paying Emile Fucking Heskey 65,000 a week until he's 35, too.
You can kid yourself about "oh, it'l be different this time" but it will not be. When he left Celtic, they had the same problems. They were paying Bobo Balde the best part of 40k a week. In the SPL. Think about it.
I note also that you're needing to buy strikers this summer. Well, good luck for that. I remember us clamouring for a reliable scorer to get us into the top four. Martin went out and bought Harewood, then Heskey. At the time Darren Bent went to Sunderland for a measley £10m.
He'll almost certainly sign Kevin Doyle for you, and you'll have misgivings and convince yourself it's about what he does in a Sunderland shirt that matters, but good fucking luck with that, because O'Neill couldn't pick a striker to save his life.
Don't get me wrong, MON had us finishing sixth (as, however, did O'Leary, which puts it in context), he's not a bad manager at all. But I'll tell you this for nothing, he'll never get you finishing about 8th or so (which these days is the new sixth, as it's harder up the top than it used to be), for two reasons. Those reasons are that to make that extra jump, you need two things - you need to play the transfer market effectively, and you need to be tactically sound.
Those, by coincidence, are MON's two major weaknesses. I've already covered transfers, but about now you should be getting the general sense that although it's ace when his Plan A works (soak up pressure, counter attack, like an away team), he genuinely does not have a clue about where to start iwth having a Plan B.
In four years with us, I also genuinely can not remember one single instance when he made a substitution which changed a match, or changed the way we were set out to play. I suspect he's probably not changed much.
I bet, for example, if i look at your last fixture, he'll have made a change at around 75 minutes. I bet he's done that in almost all your games. Over the course of time, it'll be one player more than any he brings on (for us it was Sidwell, another execrable waste of money). For you, no idea who it'l be, but it'll happen, believe me.
This is one of my favourite posts ever. Well done sir.
