Swain on Man City 3 Aston Villa 1

Ten years, four managers and hundreds of millions of pounds further on and still Villa remain on the outside looking in at the Champions League.

Defeat in the head-to-head duel with Manchester City on Saturday finally crushed the dream of a fourth-place finish and a ticket to the blue riband event in European football.

Manager Martin O'Neill can quite properly still point to a vibrant campaign that has brought three near misses - in the Carling Cup, FA Cup and now the Premier League.

He and his players deserve a rumbustious send-off when they close the campaign against Blackburn at home next Sunday.

But it was ever thus. In 2000, Villa also lost one Cup final, went out in the semis of another and finished sixth in the table.

For all O'Neill's undoubted expertise and Randy Lerner's admirably under-stated input, Villa's post-'82 positioning as the nearly club of English football appears set in stone.

That John Gregory campaign - in which the path to the League Cup final was ironically shut down by O'Neill's old Leicester team - was accompanied by much the same commentary heard this year with Villa striving to break into the Manchester United-led 'magic circle' above them.

All those discussions are raging again after City's 3-1 victory, an unkind scoreline but the right outcome - Villa were never quite good enough to accomplish the mission they set themselves at Eastlands.

The worry must be that, having now twice threatened but not been strong enough to break into the top four, it will be a while before they can do so again regardless of what happens at the top of the club this summer.

Manchester City's impossible wealth is the new ingredient breaking up the old order and should Spurs ultimately win the bare-knuckle contest they now face with Roberto Maldini's team for the Champions League's last golden ticket, they too will disappear further from Villa's reach.

Suddenly, O'Neill and Lerner will be sitting down to plan a way forward next week from a base target of finishing between seventh and 10th.

The prospectus hardly thrills the blood and is certainly not what O'Neill came to Villa for.

This sober outlook, it should be remembered, is still much, much healthier than the wasted years that preceded this manager's arrival but inevitably this season's outcome has provoked the most serious critical scrutiny so far of The O'Neill Way and left many wondering if the four-year love affair between manager and club is beginning to splinter.

There was more grumbling on Saturday to add to the complaints about a one-dimensional game plan and reluctance to utilise many, if any, players beyond his hard core group of 12 or 13.

In the passages of play which shaped the game, Villa were undone by City winger Adam Johnson, the player signed on the last day of January for £7m from Middlesbrough.

That in setting up City's second with some old-fashioned and intelligent wing play he made £12m Stewart Downing look a little foolish and left Villa fans wondering if O'Neill had bought the right wide player from the Riverside.

Downing has undoubted abilities but his contribution has also been anaemic at times and the way in which he gave up the ghost after being wrong-footed by Johnson, allowing Emmanuel Adebayor to score more easily that he otherwise might, gave us a snapshot of a dispirited player.

The report will not make for good reading when it lands on Mr Capello's desk today.

More worrying, however, is Villa's enduring inability to break down well-organised defences, a feature of which we were reminded throughout a second half City spent deliberately stationed on the back-foot waiting to pounce on the counter-attack.

Mancini will be disappointed that his players could not make more of the opportunities that came their way but not as disappointed as O'Neill must be at his team's continuing failure to dislodge well-positioned defenders with anything other than Ashley Young crosses.

Young fired over two or three of real menace as Villa strove to pull back a 2-1 deficit but all went begging.

For the rest of the time, his team's play lacked the dimensions possessed by their peers to unsettle City; despite having a goalkeeper who looked more uneasy than our PM talking to a pensioner, Villa failed to seriously test the hastily-recruited Marton Fulop.

City's emergency 'keeper had been too-easily beaten by John Carew after 16 minutes of a first-half played to a pattern much more to Villa's liking as they soaked up the home team's search for a goal while waiting to take advantage of any drop of concentration.

This method is partly by design but partly caused by the team's limitations in holding on to the ball - another frustration for some Villa fans - but it drew dividend when the better elements of Downing's game saw him play in Carew for an angled shot which went under Fulop's dive.

With some justification, however, O'Neill argued that this game was decided by 30 eventful seconds in and around the 43rd minute.

A fateful slip by Stephen Warnock as he moved to challenge the dangerous Johnson in the corner of the area, delayed his challenge for a split second which brought a clear trip.

Carlos Tevez's penalty was fairly straight but had too much power for Brad Friedel to cope with.

With their next attack, Villa so nearly reclaimed the lead but a ferocious drive by Carew smashed against the bar and City sped away from the rebound for Johnson to cut inside Downing and set up Adebayor for a close-range finish.

Thereafter, the match simmered without ever coming to the boil as O'Neill turned to Emile Heskey, who for Capello is worryingly fringe figure these days, and young Nathan Delfouneso in his efforts to retrieve the game.

But it was City who had the last word when their much more effective replacement Shaun Wright-Phillips sped away to set up Craig Bellamy for a last minute third goal which crushed Villa and their campaign.

Sadly, it was just like old times.