As someone who loathes the flood of transfer speculation we’re forced to swim through for the best part of 10 months of every year, I was actually pleased that cold water was poured on our prospects of trading in the market some time ago. However, with the transfer window coming to a close next week, there are a few signs of movement. There may be some ins and outs at Villa Park yet.

Luke Young

Luke Young is now confirmed to be talking to QPR. With their lack of activity so far, their recent take-over and Young’s London connections, this one would seems destined to happen. Which, to me, is a bit of a shame as Young could do a good job for another year and Lichaj could be eased in over the course of the season.

I guess that isn’t the long term plan and Alan Hutton’s name won’t go away, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how it pans out. It offers a like-for-like swap in the wage bill I suppose. Oh, Habib Beye? Yeah, like there’s someone out there willing to take his contract on.

Andreas Weimann

Speaking of contracts, Andreas Weimann has signed a new deal, keeping him at the club until 2014, and then promptly re-joined Watford on another loan until January.

They’re evidently very happy to have him back, hopefully he does well there – starting with Birmingham City on Sunday – and we get him back an even better player next year.

A good example of smart squad management and the right way to develop our own young players.

Good luck to Andreas, we’ll keep an eye on how he does.

Gary Cahill

Gary Cahill provides a timely example of poor squad management with news today that Bolton have rejected a bid from Arsenal with Owen Coyle saying “the word derisory doesn’t even cover it”. Of course, this prompted the return of the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Villa support in Martin O’Neill’s general direction for selling him in the first place.

I’m not absolving MON of blame, far from it, he ultimately sanctioned the deal, but he was quite clear that he didn’t want to sell Cahill.

The player was desperate for first team football and, at 23 years old, he had Martin Laursen, Ollie Mellberg and Zat Knight ahead of him. Rightly or wrongly.

Personally, I think there’s plenty of blame to go around in not seeing the opportunity within a year or so of that point for Cahill to be in pole position to become the first choice centre half at Villa.

Still, it’s easier to just point the finger at the manager and blame him, the buck does stop with him after all. I just happen to think that Cahill himself could have been a little more patient.

Regardless of who should shoulder the blame, the outcome is that we let a strong prospect go (and he was still a prospect at the time really) for £5m and then ended up spending a combined £18.8m bringing in Carlos Cuellar, James Collins and Richard Dunne on big wages and little resale value, with only Zat Knight providing any kind of offset by (ironically) joining Cahill at Bolton in a £4m deal.

Hindsight is 20/20, but the long term vision at the time is clearly questionable to say the least and we all know where we are now in terms of finances. Surely Cahill could have been given assurances about his future at Villa and placated with a half or full-season loan somewhere.

Still, that’s done now, nothing we can do about it. He may well end up in a similar fight for a regular starting place at Arsenal in the near future. We shall see.

On a more positive note; it’s encouraging that we’ve seen player after player from the academy signing new contracts during the past 18 months or so and despatched on significant loans, in some cases, to continue their development until they can be brought into the first team properly.

That’s the right way to do things, now and for the future. It’s a massive pity we weren’t doing that a few years ago, but we’re back on track now.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to look forwards rather than backwards. The future’s bright, the future’s claret and blue.