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There’s going to have to come a point where we Villa fans make peace with Randy Lerner and Aston Villa’s players because they’re going nowhere.

Lerner has tried and failed to sell the club for at least two seasons now, so we are going to have to accept that there is no benevolent billionaire coming along to save us.

In appointing a chairman and board with some football and financial acumen at least he has finally acted with Villa’s best interests at heart, which is more than can be said of the players.

I often wonder do players read the Birmingham Mail, and do they care when they read negative press?

But having watched Aston Villa this season I know the answer is that they don’t care.

How else could they be laughed at by 40,000 fans each week and still not be able to find it within themselves to go and tackle someone or close the ball down.

This team might not be statistically the worst in Premier League history, but has there ever been a team that has been as derided as this one?

In the past week they’ve been called a disgrace by Jamie Carragher and have been compared to training ground cones by David Pleat.

Any reasonable person would be furious at that. But there’ll be no reaction, and we’ll fall to another heavy defeat in our next game.

In a dressing room full of dross, Gabby Agbonlahor, Micah Richards and Joleon Lescott have been singled out as the worst of a bad bunch.

Their performances have been no worse than anyone else, but as local lads they should be leading the charge on the pitch.

How much longer are we going to have to put up with Agbonlahor?

Given his physical attributes he should be competing with one of this season’s outstanding players: Jamie Vardy, but Agbonlahor hasn’t been dedicated to improving his career in a long time and stopped behaving like a professional about five seasons ago.

And that’s why during the last international break Vardy was scoring against the current world champions and Agbonlahor was in a Dubai bar inhaling the contents of a balloon.

Thanks to Lerner’s appointments, I trust that the board, with Brian Little serving as an adviser, will choose the right man to manage Aston Villa and take the club forward.

But we’ll be stuck with more or less the same group of players and unless they can find some heart and fight – qualities which are as important as ever – I don’t fancy our chances of returning to the Premier League any time soon.