I don’t know about you, but when you’re as easily distracted as I am it’s hard to get anything done. Earlier today I was researching some statistics when I stumbled on this fantastic graph which shows Aston Villa’s Goal Difference from the Premiership years plotted cumulatively.

No single statistic can accurately depict much in football, let alone going on for two decades worth of performance in the top flight. However, it’s inescapably true that the teams with the best goal difference will generally occupy the top of the table, so it naturally follows that a graphic presentation of the cumulative growth and reduction in goal difference will be a decent indicator of the team’s fortunes along the way.

To be honest, I’ve never thought of looking at Goal Difference in this way and I found myself completely engrossed by something so simple, yet effective. I didn’t want to take someone’s work and just paste it in here without adding anything to it, so since it hadn’t been updated since October and I had the raw data myself, I decided to recreate the graph with the addition of what I think is a new football statistic.

I’ve come up with what I’m calling ‘Cumulative Win Difference‘ and as far as I know it’s not been used before. I’ve certainly never seen it anyway. At the end of the season it’s easy to deduct the number of losses from wins to give you a ‘Win Difference’, but unlike Goal Difference, that’s not a very meaningful metric. However, if you plot the same data cumulatively, in exactly the same way as Goal Difference, it becomes much more useful graphically. Basically we’re adding 1 to the CWD for a win, subtracting 1 for a loss and doing nothing for a draw.

Anyway, enough yaking, it’s probably easier if I just show you. Check it out (you can click for a full sized version):-

The more you look at it, the more you see. Especially if you have the data alongside. Here’s an overview of what I see from this graph:-

Ron Atkinson

BFR brought us into the new football era of massive amounts of money and huge TV deals with a bang with what remains Aston Villa’s best season in the Premiership so far, finishing runner-up to Man Utd with 74 points. If you thought that was a sign of things to come, you were wrong.

I love how his section of the graph starts with such a steep incline in both data series, that’s really what you want to see, but dramatic decline reveals that we were hardly any further forward by the time Ron left than when the Premiership began. The overall Goal Difference was +4 and the Win Difference was +5.

Brian Little

Brian did a good job of stopping the rot and one early run of bad form aside, made steady progress. However, as the graph shows, progress slowed and then declined around the end of his third season in charge. This is quite possibly what it looks like when a manager has taken a team as far as he can and it’s time for a change. It’s basically stagnation.

By the time he left, Little had taken the Cumulative Goal Difference to +28 and the Cumulative Win Difference to +14.

John Gregory

What a change in fortunes John Gregory brought with an absolutely stunning opening run of games. It’s not easy to pick out the finer details, but those near vertical red and blue lines at the beginning of Gregory’s section of the graph show just 2 losses in his first 23 games in charge!! If only that had been in a single season, rather than the end of ’97/98 and the beginning of ’98/99, and that could easily have been title winning form.

Gregory’s exit is still shrouded in some murkiness for me, but while he wasn’t immune to the odd bad spell along the way, he was a manager who I felt still had a lot to give. As shown in the summary table below, Gregory’s Premiership Win Percentage of 41.22% remains one key metric that Martin O’Neill has yet to improve upon.

By the time JG left he had taken the Cumulative Goal Difference to +61 and the Cumulative Win Difference to +34.

Graham Taylor

Taylor’s second period at the helm, sometimes referred to as GT II, but generally not referred to at all. A disastrous tenure in every sense of the word and the least said about it the better.

GT II is one of two managers who actually reduced the Cumulative Goal Difference and Cumulative Win Difference, leaving the scores at +52 and +26 respectively. You already know who the other manager was.

David O’Leary

DOL made a bright start and appeared to recover some respect for the club in his first season. I sometimes see MON’s back to back 6th place finishes belittled by critics pointing out that DOL also managed to finished 6th. Once. What’s as clear as day when you look at the trend in a graph like this is that DOL’s 6th place in the ’03/04 season was a blip and, taking the the GT II period into context, we were heading in a very, very bad direction.

While DOL achieved 6th place in spite of a downward trend, MON has achieved the same as part of an upward trend. This couldn’t be clearer. Most of us didn’t need a graph like this to tell us that, but it’s nice to refresh the memory now and again.

Although DOL briefly peaked the CGD slightly above the level that John Gregory had handed over to GT II, from there it was heading south in a rapid way. It’s conjecture now perhaps, and I’m extremely grateful that we’ll never know for sure, but everything points to a team heading for the Championship had there not been the significant changes required to the leadership at Aston Villa.

DOL left the CGD and CWD considerably worse than GT II had handed them to him with the Cumulative Goal Difference reduced to +36 and the Cumulative Win Difference down to +20. Thanks DOL, nice work.

Martin O’Neill

After the O’Leary years, MON received a heroes welcome when he joined Villa in August 2006. It would be foolish to believe that MON didn’t know what was happening, but Randy Lerner actually began the acquisition of the club after MON was on board.

The newly restored hope and optimism surrounding Villa Park was boosted by an impressive opening sequence of 9 Premiership games unbeaten. However, a quite woeful spell from late November ’06 though into mid-January ’07, where Villa failed to notch a single win from 11 Premiership matches, sent MON’s team tumbling down into the bottom half of the table.

After so many years of misery, Villa fans maintained their patience and belief. It may have proven to have been a masterstroke of transfer market genius now, but there were certainly a few question marks over the then club record signing of Ashley Young during the January window. Coupled with the almost embarrassingly one-sided swap deal of John Carew in place of Milan Baros, Villa recovered their form and closed out the season as they had started it, with an impressive unbeaten run in the last 9 games, finishing 11th.

During MON’s second season at the helm, 2007/08, you can see that progress could easily be described as steady until a slight blip towards the end which was a run of 3 losses in March. The 7 unanswered goals conceded to Portsmouth, Sunderland and Man Utd are clearly visible in the blue CGD series. I seem to recall a particularly vocal bunch of McExperts populating the internet with their views of MON’s failure in the preceding January transfer window. Clearly the players were tired and it was MON’s fault that he hadn’t spent gazillions on new players during the Winter.

A flaw in that school of thought was revealed when those same tired players responded by going on a 3 game winning streak, notching up a net 14 goals in the process. You surely won’t need reminding of the 4-0 destruction of Bolton, the sublime 6-0 over Derby all capped off by the glorious 5-1 demolition of Birmingham City will you? Again, this sequence is unmissable in the blue CGD series in the graph.

The third season, 2008/09, continued the same fairly steady pace, but an amazing unbeaten run of 13 games, starting with the 2-0 win over Arsenal in November, lifted Villa into the top 3, causing mass excitement and expectation. However, it proved to be something of a false dawn.

There’s a multitude of factors that can be attributed to the appalling run of form from February ’09 until finally registering a win in May with the limp 1-0 victory over Hull – primarily the loss of Martin Laursen, the addition of Emile Heskey and the Moscow saga. The interesting thing that the graph reveals is that although the bad run could rightly be described as a collapse, because MON restored the previous overall pace, it’s really just a blip. Although it is a significant blip and without it we would undoubtedly be better off, we’re clearly very much back on track and heading in the right direction.

One thing I certainly cannot see in MON’s section of the graph is any evidence of a manager who has taken the team as far as he can, a meme which is popular with some people. As it stands, MON has taken the CGD to +75 and the CWD to +39, finally above the peaks achieved by John Gregory, undoing the work of GT II and DOL.

Summary

Ron Atkinson’s section on the graph shows a manager who had completely lost it and was rightly shown the door, probably way too late as it happens. Brian Little’s section shows a good manager who turned things around, but possibly reached the limit of his abilities at the time. John Gregory’s section reveals a manager with more to offer, although his time that followed at Derby was less impressive and he’s now managing Maccabi Ahi Nazareth in Israel which places a question mark next to that assessment. It’s entirely possible that he left at exactly the right time, perhaps the peak of where he could have taken us, but we’ll never know now.

The GT II section shows a manager that never should have been and DOL’s graph looks like a manager who received a lucky bounce in his first season, but was exposed as an incompetent fool during his second and third seasons. We should all be grateful that there was never a fourth!

And as I’ve already made the case, MON’s section in the graph clearly shows a manager who has taken the club by the scruff of the neck and forced it back into recovery, sometimes kicking and screaming along the way.

Going Backwards At The Wrong Time

We all talk about the “big four”, “top four”, “Sky four”, call it what you will, but most people don’t appreciate just how recently Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool have achieved their apparent monopoly of the 4 Champions League places.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that those four teams have consistently occupied the top four places only in the last 4 seasons. Right around the time that Aston Villa were really suffering the decline created by Doug Ellis in association with GT II & DOL, the big four were solidifying their position at the top of the table. Not only were we falling backwards in real terms through our own failures, we were falling even further behind because the big four were pushing on further ahead.

Much like two cars travelling at 50mph in a head on crash experience the equivalent of a 100mph accident, two vehicles travelling in opposite directions at 50mph are effectively being separated at 100mph. This isn’t dissimilar to what Villa were doing. Not only has MON managed to pull on the handbrake and spin the car 180 degrees, he’s actually chasing hot on the heels of the top cars and make no mistake, their drivers have more than an eye on their rear view mirror.

This is an impressive achievement under any circumstances, but it’s fair to assume that it would have been highly unlikely to happen without an owner like Randy Lerner behind him. DOL steering Aston Villa to 6th at that particular time is one thing and certainly deserves some recognition, but for MON to return the club to that position after all the years of neglect and to do so in an environment where the top 4 positions are more or less considered locked off before a ball has been kicked is beyond impressive.

MON’s achievements to date would not be denigrated by any self respecting football fan, but it’s worth finally taking a look at his Premiership management record in comparison with his predecessors at Villa. This is a table I’ve used several times before on the blog and I’ll certainly use it again. (Click for a full sized version)

It pretty much speaks for itself. John Gregory just edges MON at this stage, but with 14 league games until they’ve played the same amount and currently running at 1.75 points per game this season, MON should just overtake Gregory with a game or two to spare.

You certainly get more goals under Martin O’Neill and less losses, which in theory sounds like superior entertainment, but I’ll accept that’s entirely subjective.

Silverware

Finally, I have focused exclusively on the the league as it’s the only way to be able to draw direct comparisons between managers and it’s our bread and butter. However, I would be remiss not to mention that two of the above managers have achieved what we all crave: winning something.

It should not be forgotten that Ron Atkinson led the team to League Cup victory in 1994 and Brian Little repeated the feat in 1996.

However, if the snow doesn’t stop us, Martin O’Neill will be leading his team to Wembley to attempt the same. I’ve every confidence that we’ll do very well in the Premiership this season, but I’d love to see us pick up some silverware!!

I suppose until MON delivers a trophy it might not be right to call him the greatest manager Aston Villa has had during the Premiership years, but he’s unquestionably great and if he’s not the greatest just yet, he’s not far away at all!!