Pointing the finger of blame

I've always felt Martin O'Neill was wrong in the head. Like the kind of blokes you read about in the Daily Mail who murder their wives simply because they hummed at the breakfast table and offer up some tenuous justification and expect to be seen as the victim; "Thirty years of humming, I couldn't take it anymore so I cut her up and hid her in the boot of my Datsun."

I was proved right today when he resigned just five days before the start of the season ostensibly because James Milner looks like leaving and he won't be given the transfer fee to buy new players. Well boo hoo...or as they say in Northern Ireland, boy-hoy.

By my way of thinking, it's not for the club to fit around the managers needs. All clubs would go busto if this was the case and how they don't is something I'm sure is a constant thorn in the side of HMRC.

It's actually for the manager to work within the financial constraints of the club. That's surely the crux of the job. To find players for small fees and coach them and train them to a standard where they can be competitive. Anyone can put a team together by just buying off the peg superstars (except David O'Leary), but one earns ones wages by converting raw talent into legitimate world class players no? By re-cycling players to pay the bills and also keep the team progressing. Just like Arsene Wenger do. But it's a slow process thus not a big favourite with the fans.

There's really only three types of football clubs; The Man City types with inexhaustible finances to launder/invest in their clubs, of which there's only a handful anywhere in the ze whole world. There's clubs who try to work within their own financial constraints and there's clubs who just spend like there's no tomorrow and to all hell with it. Most Premier League teams appear to fit into this last category.

Villa's owner Randy Lerner wants to be one of those clubs not laden with monumental debts and secure the long term future of the club and Martin O'Neill has decided to stamp his feet and leave, because this will mean by the time Villa have the bank roll to fund a genuine Championship winning team or at least a Champions League qualifying team, he'll have retired. This is so self-indulgent, yet in this upside down and inside out world, he'll be made out to be the victim.

The fans will probably call for Randy Lerner's children to develop aggressive cancers and the pundits will all curse the day American's were allowed entry to our football clubs. But the truth is being a Premier League manager is an incredibly privilaged lifestyle no matter what the constraints and standard of the squad at your disposal and to give it up five days before a season because you won't be given £20million pounds (or because there's a bigger club somewhere that want you) is something only the self-absorbed mentalists of the professional football world could justify.

It's his wife I feel sorry for. Keep mum at the breakfast table tomorrow dear.