4thJanuary: If it’s the start of January it must be Bent’s Not for Sale time. The management says it would be daft to sell him to one of our rivals, which should be the last we hear of it.

5 th January: Villa 2 Ipswich 1.Third round day should be one of the highlights of the season. Unfortunately, the Premier League obsession means that not enough of us care about it now, although at least a few of the older players could come back reasonably comfortably. Naturally we went a goal down in the first half but Darren Bent equalised and both he and Charles N’Zogbia showed that they’re good enough to get us up the table. We had plenty of opportunities before Andreas Weimann’s 82 nd minute winner showed, yet again, that he’s turning into an all-round striker of genuine promise. Jordan Bowery looked good on a rare occasion that he didn’t come on when we were three down while the much-maligned Joe Bennett did well. It wasn’t the hardest test ever but the team came through it with little real trouble. It’s a plus.

7 th January: Alex McLeish has learned one thing at least – he’s sent Alan Hutton back to us.

8 th January: Bradford 3 Villa 1. This is definitely a season to remember. We’ve already had the heaviest defeat ever, now we’ve had the worst. It sta rted off brightly, the team made enough chances even if they didn’t score any of them. Then a deflection fell perfectly for the ho me side, we were a goal down but still things weren’t too bad, plenty of time to put it right. And then the sky fell in with 45 minutes of the most abysmal football imaginable. Bradford get a second goal from a corner, amazingly enough, Darren Bent misses the most open goal of all time injuring himself in the process, Andreas Weimann puts us back into the game and surely that’s going to be the signal for the plucky underdogs to fall apart. No, it’s the signal for the

Some editorials are easy to write. Some are more difficult. This is one of the easy ones.

I said last month that we’d gone through a period that was diabolical yet hopeful, appalling yet partially successful and still showed some positive signs. This month’s been like that, except for the hopeful, successful and positive bits. To put it mildly, it’s been awful. You have to go back to 1987, and maybe even further back than that, to 1969 and relegation to division three, for anything as bad. Words like humiliating and embarassing have been used so often that they’ve almost lost their meaning. Virtually every game has brought a new low while events off the pitch have been just as bad.

We let in too many goals, our heads drop, there’s a lack of confidence and leadership in the team. Everyone knows it and that’s the biggest problem. It’s too easy to play against the Villa – when a team from division four can stop us twice then it’s not exactly rocket science. Yet for all that the team has been poor since the opening day of the season, our problems were probably the easiest to put right out of everyone currently struggling

The title says it all. That is how I feel at the moment. Firstly though, apologies for my ramblings in the last issue. They were the incoherent rants of a man who had finally flipped his lid after that defeat against Wigan. Since then I have gone past being angry. It’s now a mixture of irritation, wonderment at just how much further we can sink, bemusement at the lack of activity to arrest our woes and, saddest of all, utter numbness as the latest horror story unfolds.

I started writing this on the evening after the night before. That night being a frozen, snowclogged one where 40-odd thousand hardy souls braved treacherous conditions to watch our match with Bradford. “Come and roar on the boys to Wembley” the club were saying in the lead into the game. Well we did our bit. We packed the place out, gave it our all, risked broken limbs and hypothermia, and our reward was getting knocked out of the cup by a team three leagues below after treated a shambolic second half display.

I could wax lyrical about the full horror of our defending, the missed chances, the quality of the opposition and the tactics unti

In the dim and distant past when a Stayvie Bull-inspired Wolves were steadfastly refusing to get promoted from the second division, there was a vocal section of their support who wanted Sir Jack Haywood to sell up to

For a change, here's a different octogenarian ex-chairman

“someone with more ambition”. This was the same Sir Jack who'd pumped in a sizeable chunk of his own fortune into saving the club from becoming AFC Wanderers in the Midland Combination and turned them into what younger readers may recognise as the modern Wolves. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the world laughed incredulously at those ingrates who thought unrestrained ambition and financial stupidity were what it took to achieve their Panacea of being top flight strugglers. Jumping almost two decades, there's a poll on our website asking if people would rather have Doug Ellis or Randy Lerner running the club? It's like the first 150-odd issues of H&V never existed. This, to an outsider, frankly odd debate has run and run yet it would be amazing to think of pre-internet Villa supporters even momentarily pondering the ‘W

“We want our Villa back.” That’s the cry/internet comment which invariably follows our latest defeat. We get it on the occasional banner. It’s a noble aim – it would be great to own the Villa. But I don’t think the shouter/typist/designer has thought this one through. For a start. what does ‘we want our club back’ mean? How would we get it, and what would we do with it once we got it?

I don’t suppose they really want a workers cooperative, or every decision decided by a show of hands, so what they probably mean is please can we have an owner who spends a fortune every season and win trophies – just like every club wants. It still wouldn’t be ‘our’ club though. It would belong to the owner and as such subject to his whims and fancies. He could stick up the prices to Chelsea levels, sell players, appoint his mates as executives and give his son a ten year contract; we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

We haven’t been able to do anything about it for many years. Villa were unique in that the events of 1968 meant we had a shareholder base that was predominantly rooted in ordinary supporters and were probably the closest thing to a fan-owned club that English football had ever seen then, or probably has since at the top level.

In those early years at least, the board had to bear in mind the wishes of us plebs. This came to an end in 1979, when Doug was kicked off the board and sold his shares to Ron Bendall, giving a controlling interest which reverted to Doug three years later. From then on, no matter