D3D4 Columnist Darren Young gives his thoughts on new Villa manager Dean Smith, hoping that the club give their new man time to build something special at Villa Park…

Alas, Smith (Not Henry) and Terry

Picture this…a cold Tuesday night in the West Midlands. It’s November 2012 and a small crowd at the Bescot Stadium, as it was called then, saw Walsall play a first round FA Cup replay against a then-non-league Lincoln City.

A late equaliser by the home team forced extra time, in which two poor goals from goalkeeping errors saw the underdogs (although that was maybe a questionable point at the time) through to a second-round tie with Mansfield after a deserved 3-2 victory.

Fast forward almost six years, and Dean Smith, Walsall’s manager on that miserable night, is now the newly appointed boss at ‘fallen giants’ Aston Villa. With last season’s captain, John Terry, as his assistant, no less.

I feel compelled, and in a strong position to comment, on this turn of events. I was there, at that game at Walsall – more about that in a moment – and I was brought up with Villa at the forefront of my footballing outlook. My late uncle Colin, a really influential figure in my upbringing, was a Villa season ticket holder since the 60s, and watched them through thick and thin; considerably more thick in those days, it should be said.

Indeed, many of my first football matches were at Villa Park as he’d take me with him every so often. I remember a goalless Boxing Day draw with the great Liverpool team of the early eighties on a frozen pitch and most memorably, a Juventus team of Platini, Boniek and Espana ‘82 Golden Boot winner, Paulo Rossi (who scored in the first minute), win there to knock Villa, the holders, out of the European Cup in 1982/3. My uncle saw some great managers come and go at Villa Park, and he always felt that they needed time to get their style and message across; even though Tony Barton won the European Cup in his first season and not even a full one at that.

Smith, born in the same year as me I just noticed, would have been a fresh-faced youngster when Villa were the top dog in Europe, but by 1990 he was in the Walsall team, making 142 appearances in five years. After a career that took him to Hereford United, Leyton Orient, Sheffield Wednesday and Port Vale, he returned to the club as Head of Youth in the summer of 2009 and was handed the main job – as the cheap option, it seemed at time – in January 2011, steering the club to one of those great escapes that looked very implausible when he took the reins with the club nine points adrift of safety and at the bottom of League One.

However, his first win was by six goals to one, and a narrow home victory over champions-elect, Southampton, helped to secure the club’s status although it went down to the very last game, at St Mary’s, before it was confirmed despite goals from Lallana and Oxlaide-Chamberlain (what happened to them?) confirming the Saint’s title win on the same day.

Eventually, after taking the club (and 30,000 followers) to Wembley for the first time in 2015 – shame the team forgot to turn up – he was lured to Championship club, Brentford, midway through our, ultimately unsuccessful, 2015/16 season where we were in and around the top three all season but lost in the play-offs. By the time we were being beaten in Barnsley, he was already establishing himself as an emerging, young coaching talent in The Championship; that has since been enhanced by his Brentford team playing some of the best football in the EFL.

So, it came as no major surprise, especially after Thierry Henry distanced himself from the job, that he’s found himself in the Villa hot seat. He’s a fan of the club, as well as the outstanding candidate if you want a British manager capable of growing himself and the team. But his rise up the management ladder might have ended abruptly, especially after that cold night in November 2012.

It’s easily forgotten now, but the great escape was followed by some great mediocrity as the following season, he overhauled the playing staff and finished 19th and then in 2012/13, with a younger squad, a run of sixteen winless games saw his team in the relegation zone in December but recover to finish a lofty ninth.

By now, as fans, it was clear what ‘Ginger Mourinho’ was about. He was building a team that played an attractive game, with plenty of quick passing and small, adaptable players. He also astutely kept squad changes to a minimum after those early seasons, preferring incremental improvements to large-scale clear-outs.

A great start and an unlikely push for the play-offs initially kept fans on the edge of their seats in 2013/14 although after a never to be forgotten win at Wolves and ending long unbeaten runs of Leyton Orient and Brentford, they tailed off to finish mid-table and the following year, found that their performances were not always matched with results and struggled to another mid-table finish, although to be fair, a first-ever trip to Wembley in 127 years overshadowed all that.

That particular season, like the one with sixteen games without a win, saw him come under a lot of pressure from supporters and he really split opinion. There was a Twilight-style SMITHIN and SMITHOUT division between fans for a long time. Prior the reaching Wembley, his team fell to the foot of the table and in one match lost 1-0 to Crawley despite having 27 shots on goal. Most fans could see what he was doing; moulding a team little by little that was capable of having a tilt at promotion, even with one of the smallest budgets in the division, but at times, results like that threatened to undermine the evident progress.

Luckily, the club’s owner and board didn’t panic – then or back when Lincoln knocked them out of the cup – and let him build until, in that final (half) season, he’d achieved it and we nearly (and should have) got promoted. His team were even good enough to go to his new team at Griffin Park and win there in the FA Cup.

But would he have been given that much time anywhere else? Would he if he hadn’t been a long-term servant as a player and coach before becoming manager? After all, they called time on his successor’s stint as manager within a few months. More pertinently, will he be afforded any time at Villa Park, where the fans patience with Steve Bruce ran out soon after losing the play-off final (if not before)?

I hope he is. If I’ve learnt anything about football in the last six years, it’s that chopping and changing managers is a risky – and almost always wrong – way to do things. For every Watford, there are a dozen or more clubs that don’t improve their fortunes on the pitch but definitely give their ‘sacked manager contingency fund’ a hammering.

Dean Smith offers lots of positives for a club. Continuity, a pleasing style, excellent and humble media/PR, a very good eye for spotting talent and getting more on the pitch than the sum of a team’s parts. But instant success won’t happen overnight. Indeed, if it could and did, then every team in the country would win the league and follow it up with the Champions League the season after.

I’ve already seen a headline – less than 24 hours after the appointment – asking if Smith should be worried about John Terry, lurking in wait. He’s got plenty of other things to worry about before JT – although Wayne Bridge once thought the same way – and the main one is getting Villa’s season back on track. But they are only a few points (4) outside the play-off places – not nine points adrift at the bottom – and just one win from catching Brentford, so it’s far from mission impossible.

My worry is if he doesn’t get them to the Premier League this season. Will the owners and fans have the patience that Walsall’s had, or put short term thinking first and plant Terry in his place the first sign of a cabbage being hurled onto the pitch?

I heard a brilliant line from a manager at the other end of the experience spectrum, Ian Holloway, last night. He is 48 games away from being a manager for 1,000 games and remarked that, the way football is now, that target would take him ‘about six jobs’ to reach.

If you give Dean Smith time and support, he will help to build a much better club; not just a first XI. But, in the modern game, it takes bold leadership and very understanding fans to allow that to happen. Villa have shown some patience – after all, it took them about four years to get slowly relegated – but this is the big test now. Some similar sized clubs have taken years to find their way back to the top and a few still haven’t made it.

Walsall gave Smith nearly five years to get it right. He’ll get nowhere near that with Villa, and that’s understandable, but would the Holt End take faithful happily sit back and watch two or three years of progressive improvement to become a big club again, or prefer to boing-boing up and down for a number of years like their second-city neighbours, Birmingham and West Brom?

I hope they give him time and support. I’ve seen the benefits of that approach but then again, John Terry wasn’t his number two at Walsall. In a world of big names, foreign imports and an average tenure of one year, it will be a massive surprise if he is afforded the room and backing to turn Villa around if it takes longer than a season.

But all the best, Deano, because you’ve earned the chance and I sincerely hope that Villa’s board prove me wrong.

I know Uncle Colin would have felt exactly the same.