Hutton nice and calm about squad omission

Paul Lambert has spoken about his decision to leave Alan Hutton at home for the US tour, and on the face of things, our Scottish right back took things surprisingly well. Obviously here we’re only hearing the one side of things, but judging by Lambert’s words, perhaps other things were said and Hutton knows his Villa career is drawing to a close. Here are some of our managers quotes, as reported in the Birmingham Mail:

“This is just the squad I’ve decided to go with,”

“I spoke to Alan the other week and he played fine on Saturday, no worries whatsoever. This is the squad I decided to go with.

“To be fair he was okay with that, he was fine. He worked hard in the game so there’s no adverse feeling there. I just decided to go with the squad that’s here.

“I had a chat and told him what was happening with the group that’s come over here. He was fine and he did really fine against Burton.”

The first things that strikes me about this little snippet is that Hutton seems ‘fine’ with the decision, and it only seems a matter of time before the defender is on his way. At times like this, you might expect a manager to come out and say that the player was annoyed, disappointed etc, and that’s “exactly the type of reaction I wanted to see”, or at least something along those lines. There is none of that here, and even though it is only one side as mentioned, there is an overriding sense that Hutton will be moving on sooner rather than later.

This will please the vast majority of Villa fans, and in recent years I’ve rarely seen a more unpopular player at Villa Park. After the excitement of Kyle Walker, and the dependency of Luke Young and Carlos Cuellar (plus others) before him, Hutton struggled mightily at times. His disciplinary record was sketchy at best, and as I’ve mentioned previously he just seemed a typical McLeish signing.

Now is the time we start afresh, and selling Hutton would be the next step in this process. It be interesting to see who does come in for him, and whether we take a loss on the transfer fee paid. Thankfully he wasn’t too expensive, so it won’t be too big a hit.

Wonder what his reception would be like should he return to Villa Park?

UTV.