Aston Villa: Tommy Elphick ready to help Roberto di Matteo rebuild 'house that needed to be knocked down'
Sheffield Wednesday vs Aston Villa: Elphick's appointment as captain seems to suggest a return to more solid values now Villa are in the Championship after last season’s implosion
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Your support makes all the difference.Tommy Elphick, Aston Villa’s new captain, knows all about habits. This is a man who for years has been kicking both goalposts before every match as a superstitious tic.
His task as skipper of a Villa team who exited the Premier League in embarrassing fashion last spring is to help change a different kind of habit – the losing one which has become so deeply engrained in the dressing room of a once-proud club.
It is because of this habit that Villa visit Sheffield Wednesday on Sunday for their first game outside the top flight of English football since May 1988. Not since this same weekend last year, when he was skippering a vanquished Bournemouth side, have Villa won a league away match.
They have not won a match anywhere since 6 February, and ended last season by losing 12 of their final 13 fixtures. Old habits die hard, as Elphick admitted when surveying the challenge ahead.
“Winning’s habitual and so is losing,” said the 28-year-old, speaking at Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training ground on Friday. “In fact, it’s a lot easier to lose than it is to win. They got into that habit and now we need to get out of it.”
Elphick is an endearingly down-to-earth character, free of the swagger often associated with elite sportsmen. His appointment as captain seems to suggest a return to more solid values after last season’s implosion, when Villa’s dressing room displayed all the backbone of a bowl of jelly.
That said, the central defender insists that Villa’s troubles went far beyond the dressing room. “When you speak to different people and you hear all the stories about what was going on last year, it sounded bad but it’s actually a tight-knit group,” he said.
“The problem was that you had an owner who maybe wasn’t as interested as he was before and, for me, the club lacked guidance from top to bottom.”
That owner, Randy Lerner, has finally sold up – after six years of disinterest and accompanying decline – and Villa have a new owner, Chinese businessman Dr Tony Xia. They also have a new chief executive – Keith Wyness, who previously filled that role at Aberdeen and Everton – and a new manager, Roberto Di Matteo.
Di Matteo, a Champions League-winning manager at Chelsea, has pedigree at this level – he led West Bromwich Albion out of the Championship in 2010 – and he comes accompanied by Steve Clarke, his No2.
The problem was that you had an owner who maybe wasn’t as interested as he was before and, for me, the club lacked guidance from top to bottom.
“He’s worked us really hard,” said Elphick of Di Matteo, who has introduced a pre-season regime of double training sessions and has also sought to bring his players together by insisting they eat together, often twice a day.
The Italian is still working on transforming his squad. Three bids for prospective signings are currently lodged with other clubs, while Scott Sinclair is poised to depart in a £3.5m transfer to Celtic.
A player typical of the underachievement that has stained Villa’s recent past, Sinclair will not be missed. Ciaran Clark, who left for promotion rivals Newcastle United, might well be, though Villa have at least gained a proven goalscorer with the arrival of the £12m Ross McCormack from Fulham this week.
Like Elphick, Bournemouth’s captain during their 2014/15 promotion campaign, McCormack knows the Championship inside out. He has spent the last eight seasons in the second tier, scoring 116 goals.
McCormack could have joined Norwich City but chose Villa after speaking to defender Alan Hutton to assuage his anxieties about the dressing room he was stepping into.
“Gathering from what I’ve heard how the pre-season has gone here, everyone’s mindset seems to have changed,” he said.
“For whatever reason everyone seems to be really on it this season and preparing to give it a right good shot at getting back up and that’s what needs to happen.”
Yet Villa may not find it as easy as in 1987/88 when they came straight back up under Graham Taylor. If Elphick and McCormack bring knowhow, Di Matteo’s other main acquisitions so far are two 21-year-olds, Italian goalkeeper Pierluigi Gollini, signed from Hellas Verona as a replacement for the unpopular Brad Guzan, and midfielder Aaron Tshibola, recruited from Reading where he broke through under Clarke.
Indeed, their starting XI for their final pre-season friendly – a 3-1 home loss to Middlsbrough – featured nine outfield players from the clubs’ 2015/16 car-crash campaign.
There is a statistic that suggests, without further reinforcements, an immediate return to the top flight is no foregone conclusion for the former European Cup winners. In the four previous instances a team departed the Premier League with fewer than 20 points this century only once – Roy Keane’s Sunderland in 2007 – did they bounce straight back up.
The two clubs who last suffered similarly ignominious demotions, Derby County and Portsmouth, have yet to return. Yet Elphick insists he had no hesitation about dropping down a division to join the Birmingham club.
“It was an easy decision. It’s Aston Villa. I don’t care what anyone says about what happened last season. This is a new era with a new manager, new players, new owner. This might not be the most glorious period in Villa’s history but in my eyes, it’s the most important season we’ll ever have.
The fans' view
David Michael, editor of the My Old Man Said website
“In the pre-season games, we’ve been watching what we watched last season – it is effectively the same team, and that team is not going anywhere.
“Tommy Elphick is the kind of player we expected, a blue-collar player who has had campaigns in the Championship, but supporters are expecting more ins and outs. You get a sense they are not yet ready for the season.”
“Even when I came here with Bournemouth last season, I was thinking, ‘How has this football club got into this position?’ It’s the fourth or fifth must successful club in England. The important thing now is to bridge that gap between us and the supporters. We do that by working hard from the off. It’s no secret that we’re looking to go straight back up and that fan base could be our special ingredient.”
Villa Park may have been an eerily quiet place in recent years but Villa are on course to match last term’s season ticket sales and have sold all 4,500 tickets for their opening trip to Hillsborough – despite the £42 asking price.
They do not have an easy start at a Wednesday side with their own promotion ambitions and Elphick believes that Di Matteo will need time to rebuild “a house that needed to be knocked down”, as the new manager himself put it last week.
“With any transition period, you need a bit of patience,” said Elphick.
“You’ve seen that over the summer with the manager’s efforts to sign players. People want stuff done immediately, but sometimes it takes a little bit longer than you hope. Nevertheless, the aim is to go straight back up and we’re under no illusions that we’ll need a good start to do that.”
Beginning at Hillsborough where a first victory since the winter would be the ideal shot in the arm for a club desperately seeking a ray of sunshine.
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