Matt Maher: Aston Villa boss is blazing a trail towards managerial award

Who gets your vote as the region’s manager of the season?

An answer isn’t immediately obvious and sadly, not because there is a lengthy list of outstanding candidates.

Sure, the campaign hasn’t quite developed into the nightmare it threatened to be in the opening months when Villa, Wolves, Leicester, Forest and Albion all sat in or close to the relegation zones of their respective divisions.

Yet with just a few weeks to go, there is still a scenario (albeit, thankfully unlikely) in which three Midlands clubs are relegated from the Premier League.

In one of the most brutal seasons ever when it comes to sackings, meanwhile, the region has seen more than its share of the churn. Villa, Wolves, Albion and now Leicester all pulled the trigger on the manager with whom they began the campaign.

There have been some decent efforts from those to have survived the cull, if perhaps not a performance which really jumps out as award worthy.

Steve Cotterill deserves plaudits for the job he has done at Shrewsbury. Recent results might have disappointed but any season which sees Town compete for a top-10 finish in League One is a decent one.

In the same context of exceeding expectation, John Eustace must also be credited for the job he has done at Birmingham. Favourites with most bookmakers to be relegated from the Championship, this is the first time in several years they are heading into the final weeks of the season without their second tier status at serious risk. Down in League Two, the same might have been said for Walsall before the current run of one win in 18 matches soured a promising first full campaign for Michael Flynn.

An enduring problem with football’s end of season awards, whether bestowed by journalists or players, is the logistical necessity of voting taking place before the campaign has actually finished.

It leaves no room for late plot twists which can change opinions. Were Julen Lopetegui to guide Wolves to safety for instance, or Carlos Corberan win promotion with Albion, both could lay a decent claim to having being the region’s top managerial performer. Both might have had cause to be frustrated at recent results, yet both took over teams languishing in the drop zone.

Should Forest boss Steve Cooper (who took last year’s prize after an extraordinary turnaround) keep his team in the top flight, he too would be worthy of consideration. Whatever your view on the club’s expensive and extensive recruitment strategy since winning promotion to the Premier League, developing a functioning team out of such a rapidly assembled squad would prove a serious test for any coach. Cooper, you suspect, has made a better fist of it than most. We’ll learn soon enough whether it will be good enough to keep them in the top flight.

Much is still to be decided but right at this moment, if we are playing by award season rules, the most deserving candidate to be Midlands manager of the year is surely Unai Emery.

Quite how Villa’s season will finish is another unknown but the turnaround engineered by the Spaniard over the course of just 17 league matches has already been nothing short of extraordinary.

His primary aim, after replacing Steven Gerrard, of keeping the club in the Premier League has long been achieved.

So poor over the first 11 matches of the season it almost felt generous to describe them as a bottom six outfit, Villa are now in the top six and have a serious shout of qualifying for Europe for the first time in more than a decade.

The club’s board always felt they’d pulled off a coup by convincing the four-time Europa League winner to join from Villarreal, yet they surely could not have imagined the first five months would go so well as this?

Most impressive is Emery has achieved the transformation with largely the same group of players who struggled for more than 12 months prior to his arrival. Savvy as the January addition of Alex Moreno has been, he is the only signing Emery made, while the current four-match winning run has been achieved without Boubacar Kamara, the impressive young midfielder recruited last summer by Gerrard.

Instead, Emery has re-energised those who had lost their way and were in some cases starting to be written off. Villa’s charge has been led by an axis of Ollie Watkins, John McGinn and Tyrone Mings, the latter of whose consistent performances across the campaign make him a decent candidate to succeed Wolves goalkeeper Jose Sa as Midlands player of the year.

All three Villa men, it could be argued, have never played better.

“He is finding strengths in people’s games we probably didn’t realise ourselves,” remarked McGinn following a New Year’s Day win at Tottenham, just Emery’s fifth match in charge.

Three months on, it is a statement which resonates even more. Emery has made a mockery of the idea you must adapt your philosophy to the players at your disposal. Instead, he has trusted them to carry out his preferred playing style and with careful, detailed coaching, they are flourishing.

Villa might yet climb further, or perhaps falter a little, over an eight-match run in tougher on paper than any other in the league.

Regardless of what happens between now and the end of May, what we’ve witnessed so far from Emery has been little short of a managerial masterclass.