Curtis Davies joined Birmingham City in a deal likely to be worth £3.5m after being on the cusp of rejoining what he called “Sven’s revolution” at Leicester on loan. Sebastian Larsson will not be coming as a make-weight, which is just as well as I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of a player making the same switch directly and have drawn a blank. Chris Sutton is the best I could come up with, but he had already been released and actually arrived at Villa Park as a free agent.

Davies’ fall from grace has been as bizarre as it was sudden. He started 2009/10 as 50% of the senior centre backs in the squad, Carlos Cuellar being the other half, and scored the important 2nd goal in the 3-1 win at Anfield. He couldn’t make it through the entire match in the next game in Vienna as he’d been struggling with a shoulder injury, Ciaran Clark made an impressive debut in his place against Fulham after that.

By the time the Birmingham derby came around in the next game, MON had drafted in Richard Dunne and James Collins, and Davies has got no closer to the pitch in a Premiership game for Villa than the bench ever since. In his own view, he had slipped to 6th choice centre half and clearly saw no future at Villa Park.

Davies’ move from West Brom was initially structured as a loan deal, but it was always going to be a permanent switch for a fee generally reported at £8m, although I’ve seen as much as £10m. For a promising 25 year old centre back to be leaving after three and a half years with 18 months on his contract for less than half of the lowest reported original fee has to be regarded as disappointing failure.

Whether he was good enough or not, I can’t be sure, he certainly didn’t look as comfortable without the assured presence of Martin Laursen beside him. However, it has to be said that bringing in both Dunne and Collins for a combined £11m as replacements really made conditions difficult, if not impossible, for Davies to succeed and added weight to the rumours that he was on the cusp of triggering a new contract clause with another league appearance or two.

Splurging a further five or six million on another centre half to avoid the obligation of awarding a new contract to an existing £8m player makes no sense and can’t possibly be true, but then stockpiling four central defenders for a combined “investment” of at least £27m, with two promising youngsters coming through, doesn’t smack of genius either.

Whatever the underlying rationale, Davies is now a City player and it remains a sad fact that his exit will have about zero impact on our team right now, and he’s better than that. It’s a shame, but I wish Curtis all the best and hope that he’ll follow Ridgewell’s lead if we play them again, but I have a feeling he’ll have something to prove.

Cheers Curtis.