Villa didn’t score again. Dave Woodhall somehow finds something to talk about.

It’s getting harder and harder to write about the Villa. They kick off, the final whistle goes and in between there’s an hour and a half of tedium, livened up halfway through by the opportunity to do something else for fifteen minutes.

New Year’s Day brought with it the promise of better things to come, a sense of optimism that 2015 would be the year when Villa Park finally awoke from the Narnia-like sense of always winter but never Christmas. Some hope.

The goalless draw against Crystal Palace was much like the goalless draw four days earlier against Sunderland. Two mediocre teams who didn’t so much cancel each other out as send the opposition, and the crowd, into a torpor.

What seems an age ago, David O’Leary used the ‘f’ word that began his steady rise to becoming the most despised Villa manager of all time. Another ‘f’ world that’s come into play recently has been frustration – as I’ve said before, for me the worst aspect of Paul Lambert’s reign is the number of times when he’s shown that he’s capable of putting out a team to play decent football and get results, but these occasions are few, far between, and bookended by weeks of unremitting dross.

I wonder if the underlying reason for this is another ‘f’ world, namely fear. The Premier League is driven by fear; the people who run it are driven by the fear that somewhere in the deepest recesses of the planet there’s an income stream they haven’t yet fully exploited. The top four or five teams live in fear of not qualifying for the Champions League.

And most of all, the other clubs who make up the greatest league in the world are haunted by the fear of relegation. Which is why teams like Villa, and more often than not Palace and Sunderland, will be happy with scoring none as long as they don’t concede. They won’t take the gamble of losing the point they have in order to chase the other two.

Some clubs, usually the ones newly-promoted, try to buck this trend and play to win. They’re the ones whose bright new managers get hailed as the next big thing, part of a new generation with revolutionary new ideas, and lured away to the bigger clubs.

Then they find themselves in a different atmosphere, where the joy and excitement of finding yourself in a position where every day’s a holiday is replaced by the grim reality of having to cope with the fear of failure. Take Brendan Rodgers, for example, who did so well with Swansea and is now struggling with second season syndrome at Liverpool. Roberto Martinez, a trophy-winner at Wigan of all places, having the same problem across Stanley Park.

And the bloke who took Norwich from the lower reaches of League One to stability in the Premier. Whatever happened to that guy’s bright approach to football?