Aston Villa’s collapse has been one of the toughest things to watch this season.
They may have lost Fabian Delph and Chrisitan Benteke – and if you really want to throw Ron Vlaar in there too – over the summer but they’re still lined with experience. Yet they can’t show any signs of pride – or even life.
Joleon Lescott and Micah Richards have won league titles. So has Kieran Richardson, God help us. Alan Hutton has won trophies with Rangers and Spurs and he has 50 international caps.
There are enough players on the team and in the dressing room who have been around the block and there’s at least enough talent lying around there that they should have won more than three Premier League games all season. For all intents and purposes, they’re not that bad. And that’s what makes them so bad.
As soon they looked in a bit trouble, the club that has never been relegated from the Premier League were just looking for the campaign to be over like a child who can’t take his beaten on FIFA 16 and reaches for the restart button.
And Jamie Carragher seems to think so too.
‘The worst team ever to play in the Premier League: those were the words I could not stop myself saying on February 14,’ the former Liverpool defender wrote in his Daily Mail column.
‘Derby set the benchmark for the worst we have seen but, with seven games to go, Aston Villa are in danger of wrestling that tag away from them.
‘Everything I’ve seen since that capitulation against Liverpool makes me think I was right to be so critical. My adrenaline isn’t running the way it would in a television studio after a live game but I stand by my statement.’
Harsh words. Harsh, but fair.
