Get behind Villa then cause merry McLeish hell if you want him out

Because writing about my beloved football club means I have to think about our plight for more than twenty minutes solid.

I’d rather think about working until I’m 70-years-old, never being under 13 stone again and every mistake I’ve ever made with women in the last 20 years than give Aston Villa Football Club any more of my brain time.

I just could not be bothered to go down against anti-footballers Stoke City, and I am a season ticket holder.

Stoke was a game too far, in a league that is a slowly dying joke.

Yeah I’m really going to want to go to a dusk kick off on the fourth day of a bank holiday break because the team we were playing wanted a rest because they were on the tv two days before!

The fact that games are now getting delayed and moved because another unrelated game was television 48 hours before shows where our game has ended up.

It is an absolute joke, I did find somewhere to watch the game though, because thanks to that lovely landlady in Portsmouth and our European friends live Premiership games can be watched for free by working class fans again.

To cheer myself up I read Premier League chairman Richard Scudamoor’s article begging me not to watch my club anywhere but Sky as it could ruin his money hungry league, because, you’ve guessed it, they will lose out on money.

How I laughed as I settled down to watch the Villa in the warmth.

And the fact Villa were playing Stoke, one of our many bogie teams and it was raining made the decision not to grace Villa Park presence.

And I was not the only one, the official attendence was 30,100, but it looked a lot less than that, they probably counted me in the crowd because I am season ticket holder.

Randy and Paul Faulkner’s decision to hire Alex McLeish opened a Pandora’s Box of ugliness and made even thinking about the Villa a horrible thing to contemplate.

Hiring McLeish was an idiotic decision because it totally ignored the only thing that keeps football going - emotion.

Just having him as manager unleished a nasty side of football fans that is better kept hidden somewhere in a dark room.

I have cringed as a lifelong Villa fan seeing what has been written and said about Alex McLeish.

And the campaign to get him out has lacked imagination, humour or business savy, it looks and sounds like it is run by men who shout at their wives, or mothers in most cases, too much.

If McLeish football was not so bad and he wasn’t getting paid shedloads of cash I might have felt sorry for him.

The Blues connection meant he would be always hated but whoever would have been manager would have had a hard time. No decent manager wanted the job because they knew that it would not look good on their CV.

Whoever was manager had to sell our best players whilst being saddled with a load of underperforming deadwood who are on high wages who in turn prevent a job lot of new players arriving.

Thank God for our academy or we would have been in real trouble and dead certs for relegation.

We need a manager unite the club. When Doug finally woke up to the despicable mess that John Gregory left our club in he brought in Graham Taylor to steady the ship, a man that fans would trust to make the hard decisions for the long term good of our club.

That is what we needed last year, and at the end of the season, not a divisive figure that can not do right for wrong but 90 per cent of the time decides to do wrong anyway.

The fact is McLeish will not be sacked before the end of the season.

So I can not see the point of people winding themselves up into a frenzy trying to get him out, I’m pretty sure if he’s sacked mid-season it will trigger more compensation than if we dispensed of his services at the end of the season.

We are in a relegation fight, our top goalscorer is injured, as our several other senior professionals and our player of the season and all round nice fella of the decade is in danger of dying of cancer.

Perhaps I am old fashioned but I think for the next month until the end of the season the fans should unite behind the team and keep us up. At least some of the games might actually mean something which is a rarity in this boring league.

Another anti-McLeish protest will be a waste of time, unoriginal and an embarrassment for anyone involved and those of us who will be tarred with the same brush as the bedsheet bad-spellers.

The Premiership is about money. Simple as that. Nothing more, maybe a bit of glory every six months when some foreign fella scores a nice hat-trick, but all in all it is about money.

To get McLeish out will require something cleverer than a sweary twitter feed and shouting ‘bloooozescum’ into the midnight air.

To get rid of the manager you have to make the moneymen, don’t forget ol Paul Faulkner loves his accountancy spreadsheets, see that they have made a massive mistake and hit them in the pocket.

This will require collectiveness of action by a hell of a lot of fans.

Here is a few ideas, don’t buy another piece of club merchandise until he is sacked, don’t renew your season ticket, don’t log onto AVTV, organise en mass phone-ins every week to Villa Park phone lines to increase the workloads of Villa employees, don’t buy the new kit. How about besieging the club sponsors, I’m sure Genting will not be too happy if tens of thousands of Villa fans start logging on their websites and phoning their casinos screaming McLeish Out.

Any company that sponsors the Villa from matchball sponsor to advertisers in the program, could have the same done to them, whether it be Bill and Bob’s Gromit Factory in Aston or Aston Martin.

There are ways to get rid of McLeish without making Villa fans look like a load of thicko yobs.

Good luck, I hope you succeed in getting rid of McLeish, but, me, I just can’t be bothered.

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