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Post by peekay on Sept 3, 2007 19:32:36 GMT
Obviously he would be a Villain (no pun intended) usually but just for today I am going to nominate him for hero status for his grin and handshake when Abramovic spat his dummy out and skulked off yesterday.  |
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Post by coops on Sept 3, 2007 19:59:21 GMT
Yes it was excellent, he did everything but stick two fingers up at Abramovich For those that missed it, here it is in all it's smug glory:  |
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Post by ojiveojive on Sept 4, 2007 16:39:20 GMT
Unfortunately I cannot consider Doug Ellis to be a hero even though he took great delight in the Villa beating Chelskov. When Doug Ellis took over Aston Villa were League Champions and had just become the European Cup winners. Prior to taking over at Villa, Deadly, as he likes to be known, had been a director at both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Birmingham City, failing in his attempts to become chairman at both of them. He bought into Villa at a knock down price and according to their own published accounts became the first salaried director of a football club, taking out far more in the intervening years than he ever put into the club. During Deadly's reign there were no photographs of the European Cup victory on display at Villa Park, a point made and reversed by Martin O'Neill when he took over as manager. It seemed that Deadly denied any Aston Villa history before his reign. Deadly employed the first foreign manager, Josef Venglos, who apparently couldn't understand or speak a word of English. Deadly always kept his managers on extremely short leads and it is rumoured that he also interferred with team selection. I have a personal reason for disliking Deadly which is related to the first ever pop concert held at Villa Park in July 1983, all profits to be donated to Mencap, starring Duran Duran (the biggest band in the world at the time) and Robert Palmer, for which I was project manager preparing the ground in the two weeks leading up to the concert and stage manager on the day, on behalf of the promoters. All I can say is that someone attempted to increase the contracted rental of Villa Park by a five figure sum, some two days before the event. The contract was watertight and the attempt was rebuffed. This led to me, a lifelong Villa fan, refusing to set foot in the place whilst Deadly was 'in the chair', a state of affairs that lasted for 23 years!
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Post by coops on Sept 4, 2007 18:59:23 GMT
As a fellow Villa fan and a ST holder at VP for a few years I can certainly empathise with many of your views, although I will say that Ellis did bow to fan pressure about the whole European Cup thing and a mural of Mortimer holding the Cup aloft appeared in The Holte End concourse a few years ago.
To be fair I have mellowed to the old sod these days after being quite an activist in many an "Ellis Out" protest, probably this was due to seeing people (mainly from behind a keyboard - natch) get so worked up about him that they would actually come out with preposterous stuff such as hoping he died of cancer and that they would gladly piss on his grave, I realised that I couldn't really hate a man whose only crime to myself was to not be as ambitious as I was about my football club. Basically i got a sense of perspective.
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