The Fiver: Villans and heroes

This probably won't happen very often but it's worth it.

It's from The Fiver and if you do not subscribe to it I strongly recommend you do.

Follows is the headline story from today's Fiver and it appears it's not just this site that seems to think David O'Leary should keep his mouth shut.

VILLANS AND HEROES

According to the League table, 61 places separate Premiership poormouths Aston Villa and League Two journeymen Wycombe Wanderers. According to the AA Route Planner, 92.42 miles separate their grounds. So when a deranged band of Villa fans embarked on a - Fiver counts its extremities - 184.84-mile round trip, on a school-night, to pay lots of their own money to watch an underachieving team of overpaid wasters troop off at half-time in a Carling Cup tie 3-1 down to a team slumming it three divisions below them, you could forgive them for voicing their displeasure.

After all, history didn't suggest that Villa would emerge for the second half and score seven goals without reply, which is what they did, astonishingly enough, prompting manager Dvd O'Lry to plumb new depths of smugness, even by his own charmless standards. "I take no notice," he said of the boo-boys, clearly taking notice. "There is a genuine bunch of fans and then there is a fickle mob who get on your back very quickly. You have to let it go right over your head."

And as the Fiver ran assorted snatches of this drivel through its spanking new Managerial Waffle Translator (results: "genuine bunch" = "gullible morons who'll put up with any old rubbish" and "fickle mob" = "justifiably angry travelling supporters"), O'Lry was fulsome in his praise for his charges. "We didn't panic and they deserve credit for digging themselves out of trouble," he beamed. Asked to elaborate on how he'd prompted Villa's remarkable second-half turnaround, however, the Irishman was giving little away: "We knew the first half wasn't good enough and what I said to the players will remain in the dressing room," he declared, leading a confused Fiver to surmise that it must have been half-time hugs, congratulations and backslaps all around.

After all, anything else would have been fickle.

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