Villa – Rotherham; Lose this and Bruce has to go

Lately, I’ve been left fuming after most of our performances.
Sometimes, it’s best not to post knee jerk reactions straight after the game, as they can leave you looking like a mug.
So I’ve left it a couple of days to try and think reasonably in hindsight.
Nothing has changed though and I’m 95% of the way there to calling for Bruce’s head after the utter load of rubbish I witnessed during the Blackburn game.

I’ve often said that I can stand boring, turgid footy if we’re getting results.
Ok, the “entertainment” bores me, but the feeling I get when we win more than makes up for it.
Winning is what it’s all about, after all, isn’t it?

But when rubbish footy is combined with poor results, it’s just not good enough.
Apparently Bruce looked resigned when Sky showed a shot of him.
I didn’t see that on the Villa feed, but I’m not surprised, as he must also know it’s not good enough.
Four draws and a spanking loss in the last 5 games says it all.

Bruce’s recent comments have been interesting, to say the least.
He asked if he’ll ever win over certain sections of the fans and the answer is, no he won’t, because his football is so poor. What I seriously think he doesn’t realise is that it’s not just a section of fans that want him gone; It’s a majority.

The 5% of me that doesn’t want to call for his head is the fact that I think he’s partly correct when he says that the team need time to gel.
The problem I have is that I don’t think we have time for it to gel.
If we go another few weeks of poor performances combined with poor results, we might as well kiss promotion goodbye, hence we need to start getting wins quickly.
But who do we think will come in and get the team firing instantly?
That’s the question.

Bruce has also come out with the fact that we brought in £25 million, while paying out £2 million last season, as his latest excuse and while that’s admirable, it certainly didn’t seem like that and it’s been said lots of times that most other managers in this league would practically give a limb to get the squad we’ve got.
And it’s this part that makes me question Bruce the most.
How can he make what looks a great squad, on paper at least, look so poor on the pitch?
There’s just no urgency, no pace and most importantly, no incisiveness to our game.

Some pundit came out and said he doesn’t see a team.
I think he’s right, as I don’t either.
We rarely seem to target any of the opposition’s players and it’s all just reactive, instead of proactive and there’s just no plan that I can see.
It’s just a case of “ok, go out and win the game”, which you would think is enough, given our players.
And might have been enough under the likes of Clough.
But it’s not, when you face a team that is well-drilled, with a plan, these days. Which is exactly what most teams are.
It’s not like our players look like they’re busting a gut either, which worries me.
I along with many of us, see that Grealish hasn’t performed lately, for example.
Is it just poor form or more than that?
I don’t know, but it just seems endemic in the whole team, to me.

Onto tomorrow’s game then and this is our first game at home in a while, so it’ll be interesting to see the fans’ attitude if we perform poorly again.
If, horror of horrors, we concede an early goal against a team of such poor resources compared to ours, I dread to think what the reaction will be.

This ought to be a very straightforward win for us, but Rotherham did well in beating Derby on Saturday (something I took great delight in teasing my Derby mate over, will my mickey taking bite me on the butt?).
We don’t do straightforward, these days, do we?

I have to go for the home win, 2-1, but I have serious doubts.
And that’s a shocking state of affairs.
If we lose this, I can only see one conclusion.