TO boo, or not to boo? That is the question.
On the face of it, jeering Alex McLeish and the Villa players at half and full-time for a single-goal defeat to the reigning champions seems a tad harsh.
But the boos were less a reaction to this particular match and more a response to how the Villa Park faithful’s hopes have been replaced by fears.
This defeat to their home bogey team was by no means Villa’s worst performance or result of the season, but it was a worrying signpost of what has been and what is possibly still to come.
Those concerns will not have been helped by the plight of three of McLeish’s four summer signings, who, quite literally, added insult to injury for the manager.
With Christmas and then the January sales coming, Villa fans will be wondering if McLeish kept the receipts for a couple of them.
With Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea (as well as Bolton and Stoke) on the immediate horizon this month, McLeish’s squad is in danger of becoming as stretched as the Holte End’s patience.
Not for the first time this season Charles N’Zogbia went missing, being booted out of the matchday 18 by McLeish after breaching club discipline by failing to report for a treatment session.
Soon Villa were also without Shay Given and Jermaine Jenas too as the reliable goalkeeper and brittle midfielder were carried off. All it needed was for Alan Hutton to be sent off to complete the set and deprive McLeish of all four of his new boys but this time the defender behaved himself.
In truth, that would have required Hutton and Co getting near enough to their superior opponents and that simply did not happen during a first-half display McLeish correctly described as “insipid”.
At least the claret and blues have prepared TV viewers for the endless Christmas repeats during their four appearances on the box so far this season.
Against QPR, Spurs, Swansea, to a lesser extent, and United, Villa’s television dramas have followed a predictable plot of bland before the break, slightly better after it. The adverts have made more enjoyable viewing.
McLeish will bear the brunt of it and given his previous employment it was always going to be a case of the manager not being able to do right for doing wrong.
The problem is, he and his players are not doing enough right and too many things are going wrong.
Even when he picked near-as-damn-it the ‘people’s team’ on Saturday, starting with Barry Bannan, Marc Albrighton and Jenas, instead of Emile Heskey, N’Zogbia and Fabian Delph/Stiliyan Petrov, there was an apathy about Villa’s underwhelming style of play.
While Fergie’s title challengers knew each other’s jobs inside out, Eck’s players weren’t entirely sure about their own roles.
It’s hard to read too much into a defeat against the champions. Villa have endured so many winless matches at home to United in the Premier League that it is unfair to criticise McLeish for what predecessors John Gregory, Graham Taylor, David O’Leary, Martin O’Neill and Gerard Houllier also all failed to achieve during the past 16 years.
