Taylor seeks way through Aston Villa 'minefield'

For the burgeoning band of disaffected Aston Villa fans, one player's pre-season prognosis chimed exactly with their own. "A big club with a great tradition, but in danger of living in the past," he declared. "Good enough to survive in the Premiership, maybe have a good cup run or even earn a Uefa Cup spot, but never going to win the championship."

The words were, in fact, those of Tim Sherwood and concerned an alleged lack of ambition and reluctance to invest in players by Villa's hosts today, Tottenham Hotspur. The midfielder, who has, coincidentally, been linked with Villa this week, was carpeted for his criticisms. Yet to many of the claret-and-blue persuasion they applied equally to their club.

Barely a week into a fresh campaign, and with a far-from embarrassing 1-0 defeat by Liverpool the only tangible evidence on which to judge Villa, it is obviously rather early to be talking of a club in crisis. Their problems, however, extend beyond results and recruitment into the way the club is run, and how both the manager, Graham Taylor, and more pertinently the chairman, Doug Ellis, are perceived by their public.

Villa, remember, are the team of whom it was said that the public would turn out to watch their shirts drying. In the old Third Division, 30 years ago, they drew a crowd of 48,000 against Bournemouth. A decade later they beat Bayern Munich to win the European Cup. And when they led the Premiership entering the second half of 1998-99, before falling away horribly, the then-manager John Gregory reflected on their potential to be "the Manchester United of the Midlands".

Gregory finally gave up his war of attrition over Ellis's tight control of the Villa purse strings and decamped to Derby. There, with a "hands-off" chairman, he is conspicuously happier, despite relegation and a £30m debt. He bequeathed Taylor a team who, to borrow another of Sherwood's asides on Spurs, were "treading water"; who invariably led the also-rans behind the European qualifiers and finished comfortably clear of the relegation zone.

When he unveiled his successor, Ellis looked to have outflanked his critics. Taylor, before his incarnation as the tabloid "turnip" in charge of England, was a popular and successful Villa manager. But football has undergone dramatic convulsions since then. The long-ball "style" with which he raised Watford is no longer effective, the influx of foreigners having been influential in reasserting the passing arts. Salaries and transfer fees have spiralled (arguably vindicating, or at least mitigating, Ellis's determination to "live in the past" as Gregory put it). Players have freedom of contract, agents are everywhere.

It was a different world, therefore, into which Taylor returned from retirement (at the age of 57, as against 42 when he first arrived). Values had changed, in a footballing and financial sense, and he had to prove he was not yesterday's man. He was initially careful to distance himself slightly from Ellis, laughing off suggestions that he would be the septuagenarian's poodle, though, after six months of his second coming and considerable changes in personnel, the impression is still of a club mired in mediocrity.

Looking beleaguered at an ominously early stage, Taylor, a decent and affable man, snapped when a spectator abused him after the Liverpool game. Later, he talked darkly of the club being as difficult to manage now as in 1987-90. It was "like a minefield", he sighed, with "hidden agendas all over the place". Without naming Gregory but unmistakably alluding to his £73m outlay over four years, he remarked: "The money has been spent and you can only spend it once."

The jury is out on his own signings (seven players for a board-pleasing £11m following yesterday's £1m capture of Charlton's Mark Kinsella). The most serious doubts concern the most expensive, striker Peter Crouch, for whom he paid Portsmouth £4.5m and whose 6ft 7in stature inevitably tempts team-mates to resort to route one. Taylor must trust that Crouch, like Gregory's £9.5m club-record buy, Juan Pablo Angel, belies unfavourable early impressions.

Nor did it encourage confidence when he allowed Villa's most dominant midfielders, Paul Merson and George Boateng, to leave before he had replacements lined up. With the new transfer window looming on 31 August, he has tried to prise Kinsella's Republic of Ireland partner Matt Holland from Ipswich for £4m, begging the question as to why negotiations did not start until the deadline was barely 10 days away.

Holland's subsequent claim that there was a "big gap" between the terms offered and those expected opened Taylor and Ellis up to familiar accusations. "Lack of ambition" – the phrase is recited like a mantra around Villa Park, with both Merson and the transfer-seeking Turkish defender, Alpay Ozalan, trotting it out this summer.

Taylor, meanwhile, deserves time to build a team capable of achieving his modest targets of "stability and regular European football". Villa have played only 14 League fixtures under him, winning three, and he believes they are in a similar position to Liverpool when Gérard Houllier took sole control three years ago. Three years, that is, and around £100m in transfer expenditure.