Martin O’Neill and his players headed for Dubai today for some warm-weather training and maybe a few moments of reflection on the unfortunate run that has increased the risk of their epic season ending in bitter disappointment. How they needed a positive result at Manchester City last night to throw Arsenal off their scent, but instead, despite something of a fightback in the second half, they were disjointed and appeared to some degree distracted. The interruption in the season may have come at an ideal moment, although one can’t help wondering whether the players and staff would be better off having some time away from football and each other completely rather than just the training ground.

STRANGE NIGHT IN MANCHESTER
With their opponents neutered as an attacking force by injuries to Robinho and Craig Bellamy, and weakened defensively by losing Micah Richards, there was every reason to be optimistic. And, although Blackburn seemed a while ago, Villa were still on a run of seven successive away wins in the Premier League. But only some wayward finishing from City in a first half in which they were greatly superior allowed Villa to hope they would get back into the game; and just when it looked like they might score and equaliser, they conceded the decisive second. Any other result than a home win would not have reflected the play, though. Every team has bad games and bad patches, but some of the events of Wednesday night were hard to explain.

Curtis Davies wore a black armband following, we learned later (and Martin O’Neill was at pains not to talk about it), a family bereavement. Everyone would have been sympathetic had he withdrawn from the game and in hindsight his substitution at half-time was not as surprising as it seemed at the time. What was hard to understand, if not entirely a shock, was the combination of positional changes made by O’Neill to accommodate it. Carlos Cuellar was probably relieved to move to centre-half, but the choice to put James Milner at right-back was puzzling. Not only did O’Neill have the option of using specialists (Shorey could have been introduced and Luke Young moved across), but Milner had already been shown a yellow card for fouling Shaun Wright-Phillips and had struggled to contain City’s outstanding winger in the first half.

Further up the field, Emile Heskey had faded badly after a good start, and was obviously affected by his Achilles problem. Now he found himself on the right wing. It was reminiscent of the days before substitutes when injured players used to be abandoned to limp up and down the touchline. Eventually Gabby Agbonlahor moved to the right while Heskey lumbered up front alongside John Carew, but every attempted sprint was clearly causing pain. Surely a fitter Nathan Delfouneso or even Marlon Harewood would have been more useful than the almost immobile Heskey?

Some Villa fans have considered any criticism of Martin O’Neill to be bordering on sacrilegious and certainly it cannot be denied that the club has made considerable progress under his stewardship. If he can break the hegemony of the top four in the Premier League this season it will be a major achievement and he will deserve all the plaudits that he will receive. But there has been some disquiet over some of his recent decisions. Without dragging up last week’s arguments again, it is certainly true that supporter opinion was divided on leaving the star players out of the trip to Moscow, and if Villa do not now go on to achieve their target in the Premier League, the choice to throw away their chance in the UEFA Cup will once again be hotly debated.

TIRED?
Last night’s showing did little to disprove the widely-held theory that the Villa squad is running out of steam. Again, it is not necessary to restart the debate about why Villa have such a small squad when O’Neill has pointed out the restrictions imposed by the low number of bodies at countless press conferences over the last three years. However, it is getting harder to deny that a miscalculation has been made in terms of the resources that Villa would need to challenge this season. Here, verbatim, is O’Neill’s response to my suggestion after last night’s game that the players might now be getting “tired” - and in fairness to him, I shall leave the question unedited too, since I clearly fluffed it a bit. Maybe I was tired as well....

MT: There has been a lot of comment in the media, suggestions from people that the team is tired. You've had an awful big workload going back to last July. Is that true, and do you need this break?

MO’N: The minute that you lose a game everybody thinks you're tired. And of course, then we get criticised when we rested some players and didn't take them to Russia. I'm honestly not bothered. I really am not bothered. I'm answering your questions as honestly as I possibly can, that's not a problem, that's part of my job and it's your job to ask me. But we've got ten games to go. We've got an exciting end to the season. That in itself should re-invigorate you. We've got a chance now, we will take a couple of days break, we won't have a game for the first weekend for, well, I don't know how long. I think that the international players, and we've got plenty of them, that will help them. We are in control still of our own destiny, and outside the fortnight where the players are away on international duty again, then we can control the training, we can control the rest and we can control all of those things to a great extent. So it's up to us. We'll get ourselves, as we did in the second half, re-invigorated, and we will go for it. We're still there. I don't think the players really want to throw this, naïve or not, I don't think they want to throw this up now having come so far.