Hottest ticket in management lurches in the wrong direction

Right now our former captain, Paul Lambert, is one of the hottest tickets in football management so it’s no surprised that Norwich City have been unable to hold onto him.  Inside three years he transformed the club from one that lost 1-7 to Colchester United (then managed by Paul) to one of the most improved teams in Europe, earning two consecutive promotions and a mid-table finish in the FA Premier League.

If Lambert ended up at Liverpool, or even Chelsea, you would not have been surprised.  Instead, he’s set to go to Aston Villa.  During their Martin O’Neill era Villa splurged cash they ultimately realised they couldn’t afford.  Martin walked out days before the start of the season in August 2010.  Since then they pitched Gerard Houllier at the job before poaching Alex McLeish from relegated city rivals Birmingham.

In short, Villa looks like a club without the vision to build stable progress.  Unlike Norwich, who seem to know exactly what they are doing.  They even coped with the loss of Neil Doncaster, who left the club a few months before the arrival of Lambert.

Norwich City is the better job.

I’m on Radio Scotland with Jim Spence around 16:15 today, talking about social media and football, square sliced, the price of milk and lawn care.