Di Matteo’s Aston Villa picked up just one win in eleven games while their penchant for collapsing late on hardly helped.
When you’re handed your freshly-printed P45 12 games and 124 days into a two year contract, chances are you haven’t exactly lived up to expectations.
And while a number of Aston Villa fans will argue that, statistically speaking, Steve Bruce’s record over the last eleven games is far inferior to Roberto Di Matteo’s brief spell at the helm, the Italian did little to justify the initial faith placed in him by owner Tony Xia, as the businessman has made emphatically clear on his official Twitter account.
Di Matteo may have led Chelsea to the Champions League but that counted for nothing at Ashton Gate, Deepdale or Hillsborough.
In fact, Villa won just one of his eleven league games in charge, drawing five in a row in September, while dropping nine points thanks to goals conceded in the final ten minutes of games against Sheffield Wednesday, Huddersfield, Nottingham Forest, Brentford and Barnsley.
And though Bruce’s record hardly reflects his ‘Championship specialist’ tag that has not stopped Xia aiming a rather sly dig at the former boss on Twitter – after all, you could hardly describe a team with a penchat for capitulation particularly ‘gutsy’.
However, Villa fans could do with seeing some much-needed passion from those on the field too with a run of five defeats in six ramping up the pressure on Di Matteo’s predecessor.
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