July 2011 Archives

By Mat Kendrick, Aston Villa correspondent

SOMEWHERE on Stewart Downing's mantelpiece is a metal pin in a glass jar.

Villa fans understandably fuming from Downing's impending departure to Liverpool could be excused for thinking it's a Frankenstein-style bolt from the winger's neck, given the general claret and blue consensus that the club created a monster.

In actual fact the steel pin is the one which bonded his fractured foot with sufficient success he passed a medical on crutches at Villa exactly two years ago on Saturday.

Downing kept it as a souvenir of the faith Villa showed in signing him for a then joint club record £12 million fee from relegated Middlesbrough despite his serious injury woes.

"It was quite a long pin to be fair," Downing told me back in October 2009.

"Am I keeping the pin? Yeah, but I have had to have it sterilised.

"I am keeping it. It just looks like a nail you would bang into a door."

He might as well bang it into the Anfield dressing room wall to hang his new Reds shirt, although Villa fans would gladly string him up on it given half a chance.

It's not so much the leaving for bigger and better things, although quitting for another club without European football next season is a slight on the claret and blues.

It's more the leading on and letting down; the tacit refusal to acknowledge and repay the privilege Randy Lerner gave him by subsidising his half a season on a treatment table without kicking a ball.

It's that Downing was happy to take Villa's money when few other top clubs would have touched him, but that any loyalty was conspicuous by its absence as soon as the first head-turning sniff of an offer materialised.

Then there was the shoddy way his departure was engineered.