When you decide to throw open the doors to a new Aston Villa hall of fame, it’s incredibly tempting to make the first inductee one of the indisputable greats of the club.
I might have started with Paul McGrath, perhaps the best player I’ve ever seen playing for Villa. It could have been Gordon Cowans, who I was lucky enough to watch in the flesh but certainly not in his prime.
Brian Little was surely in the running. I didn’t see him playing live but I’ve seen enough video to know what he was about and I was a season ticket holder at Villa Park throughout his time as manager.
Go back a little further and there’s Ron Saunders and Tony Barton, Dennis Mortimer and Peter Withe, Tony Morley and Gary Shaw. Before that, Peter McParland. Earlier still, our football club was built by men like George Ramsay, William McGregor and Frederick Rinder.
There’s enough history at Villa to keep the Legends Series going long after I’m dead, titans of the sport behind every corner of B6.
It’s a vast brief. In the end, the only place that felt right as a starting point was with something personal.
Villa didn’t handle relegation all that well. They were ironically unprepared despite having not so much flirted with the possibility for years as flashed it their tan lines at every opportunity.
Those three years in the second tier, the first time Villa had been outside the Premier League since before it was the Premier League and a whole generation – my whole generation – was introduced to 46-match seasons and Tuesday night losses against teams that were closer to non-league than the top flight not long before.
The Championship is a tough league. It’s hard to get out of and it takes something a little bit special to elevate a team out of the admittedly beautiful morass of lower league football.
For two seasons, Villa were anything but special.
Then, suddenly, something happened that was very special indeed.
“[Dean Smith] has been my favourite manager by a country mile,” former Villa goalkeeper Jed Steer exclusively told AVF.
“He’s a fantastic coach. He just loves coaching and developing players. I loved his tactics and the way he put those across to everyone, but more so the actual person and the manager he is.
“With football, it’s so up and down it’s crazy. You win one game and you’re like Barcelona. You lose the next and you’re horrendous, the worst team ever, you should all be dropped.
“As players, we feed off the manager. On a Monday morning you can gauge how the manager feels and if he’s down and angry because you’ve lost at the weekend, that rubs off on everyone.
“But Dean was the same person whether you win, lose or draw.”
Winning soon became the norm after Smith was appointed. It didn’t happen overnight. Progress in the Championship seldom does. But by the end of the 2018/19 season Villa were a juggernaut.
Sometimes, football’s stars align. Smith is a Villa supporter and had another, Jack Grealish, as his captain. That Smith had the wherewithal to get the club back on track and Grealish was an absurd talent with no business being in the second tier made promotion a real possibility.
It took a mammoth effort for it to actually happen and 27th May 2019 became one of the best days in the club’s history not just because of what they did, but because of who it was doing it.
Smith arrived at Villa the long way round. Having played the entirety of his career in the Football League, he returned to former club Walsall to work with the youth team and, in 2011, begin a managerial career that earned him a reputation as a measured and innovative coach with serious potential.
Brentford’s incredible progress with Smith at the helm – albeit a role Smith himself understands was ably supported by the club and his colleagues – put him in the frame for an emotional union with Villa. They needed him more than he needed them.
Smith ended up managing Villa through a strange period. Covid-19 pulled the fabric of football asunder and Villa achieved Premier League survival in empty grounds. Grealish left. Eventually, Smith left too. The top division is a demanding environment and nothing gold can stay.
But it was the match that put them back in the Premier League in the first place that serves as the beginning, middle and end of Smith’s Villa legacy.
The Championship play-off final was an unusual experience for Villa. 2017/18 was the first time the club played in the play-offs more than 30 years after they were introduced. The timidity with which they approached that final against Fulham was disappointing but the entire club was listless.
A year later, Smith stepped onto the Wembley turf with a huge responsibility and delivered. What I felt in the stand in north-west London that afternoon was unlike anything football has give me before or since.
I saw Villa win two trophies at Wembley in 1994 and 1996 but I was a kid.
This was different. I knew what it meant. I knew its full context. I knew the consequences of failure and the weight of the task as it must have rested on the shoulders of a team whose place in Villa legend is etched into stone as far as I’m concerned.
Smith did that.
Yes, Grealish was ten times as good as the next best Championship player. John McGinn was the best piece of transfer business Villa have done for generations.
Tyrone Mings, Tammy Abraham and Axel Tuanzebe were outrageous loan deals. Derby County were no match for players of the quality of Conor Hourihane, Albert Adomah and Anwar El Ghazi at one end, nor for Steer, Ahmed Elmohamady and Neil Taylor at the other.
Yes, it all came together when Villa needed it most.
But Smith did it. He got it. He felt it.
Dean Smith is Legends Series Member 001.
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