Matt Maher: A month is a very long time in football’s crazy world

He is, after all, the head coach who less than 18 months ago masterminded one of the most extraordinary escapes from relegation the Premier League has ever seen.

Through his tenures at Walsall, Brentford and Villa he has proven a master of staying cool and finding his way out of a crisis.

Yet even without those experiences to fall back on, Smith could find solace and a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change simply by looking at those of his counterparts in the top flight.

Just two months ago, Mikel Arteta was considered a dead man walking after Arsenal lost their opening three Premier League matches. Last week, ahead of the Gunners’ sixth win in eight, the Spaniard was playing down links to the Barcelona job.

At around the same time Arteta’s Emirates obituary was being penned by sections of the media, meanwhile, Nuno Espirito Santo was picking up the manager of the month prize for August after an impressive start to life at Tottenham. Earlier this week he was sacked after just four months in charge having lost five Premier League matches out of seven.

The tipping point was last Saturday’s 3-0 home defeat to Manchester United, a fixture opposite number Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had entered under the most severe scrutiny and odds-on with most bookmakers to be the next top flight boss to get the chop.

Football management has always been a tough business but never before, at least in the Premier League, has it felt so volatile. One bad month is all it takes to ramp up the scrutiny. Since the end of last season, six clubs have changed their manager, with Tottenham managing it twice.

Several more bosses have, to varying degrees, seen their positions come under scrutiny, from Brendan Rodgers after Leicester’s indifferent start to Rafa Benitez, feet barely under the desk at Everton, who has found himself urging patience following a run of poor results due in part to a slew of injuries.

Every club and case is difference, of course. Smith’s critics would argue their concerns are based less on recent results and more a general downturn since the turn of the year, which has seen Villa take just 39 points from their last 34 matches.

It’s a fair point, albeit one which ignores some important circumstances, from the heavily-congested fixture list caused by January’s training ground Covid-19 outbreak, through the loss of Jack Grealish to injury and then sale, to the injury list which has this season prevented the head coach from hitting on a consistent first XI.

There is always plenty beyond a manager’s control and Smith would hardly be the first to feel events are conspiring against him. You can’t blame everything on bad luck but even the greatest, from Clough to Ferguson, have needed a bit of fortune now and again.

For now the fiercest criticisms of Smith have been confined to social media, with little evidence of unrest in the stands. There is certainly a sense, not just regarding Villa, of online discussions increasingly setting the agenda, perhaps making the pressure seem more heightened than it actually is. Smith certainly hinted at that yesterday when he remarked: “Perceptions from outside a football club are very different from what they are within a football club.”

Having kept faith with Smith in far stickier situations than the one Villa find themselves in now, it would be something of a surprise if the club’s board lost faith, even if the result does not go in their favour at Southampton tonight.

Patience would probably be prudent because while sacking the manager might seem an ever more popular solution for Premier League clubs, bringing in the right replacement is far from a perfect science.

Smith has proven one of Villa’s best hires for decades but had things panned out differently, Thierry Henry would have been the man replacing Steve Bruce in October 2018. Simply making an appointment isn’t easy at the moment. Witness Tottenham’s two-month search before settling on Nuno as Jose Mourinho’s replacement, or the increasing farce of Newcastle and their efforts to appoint Steve Bruce’s successor.

Get a managerial appointment wrong and the results can be catastrophic. Among the root causes of Villa’s decline following the 2010 departure of Martin O’Neill was a succession of poor choices. The grass is not always greener.

That isn’t to say managers should be immune from scrutiny, or the sack. But the latter will always be the biggest decision a club can make and much as it might seem an increasingly popular one, can never be taken lightly.