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Ian Taylor the popular midfielder was also taken aback at the news

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Ian Taylor, the popular midfielder, was also taken aback at the news. He said: "A reporter phoned me to ask for a reaction to John leaving and I thought it was a wind-up. I don't know what has happened."It was what had not happened in the Premiership that hurt Gregory's cause. In 2000, after the loss of Dwight Yorke to Manchester United for £12.6m, Villa finished sixth for the second season running and again missed out on a place in the Uefa Cup. They reached the FA Cup final but lost 1-0 to Chelsea.Last season, despite spending a club-record £9.5m on the Colombian striker Juan Pablo Angel, Villa finished eighth and resorted to take the Intertoto Cup route into European competition. Qualification for the Uefa Cup followed but a potentially lucrative run was ended at the first stage when Villa embarrassingly lost in the first round to Croatian side Varteks.When the Colombian's wife and child fell ill, unsettling the forward as he struggled to make an impact in the English game, Gregory's judgement was called into question.Ellis had warned Gregory, who spent more than £60m on players during his reign but brought in over £50m through sales, that there would be no more money for new signings as a means of lifting Villa, who are seventh in the Premiership.History suggests Gregory's successor will be a former Villa player who is used to working on a relatively tight budget. Perhaps on that basis, Graydon would be among the front runners.

Sacked this week as manager of Walsall, who he guided into the First Division, Graydon played for Villa from 1971 to 1976.Others who fulfil those criteria are Graham, Curbishley and Rioch, while of the current team Peter Schmeichel and Merson have expressed interest in moving into management. Perhaps neither of those two would be considered, but one who may be, despite lacking a Villa connection, is Venables.In addition, Graham Taylor, who enjoyed considerable success in his time in charge in the late Eighties before taking the England job, is back at the club as a non-executive director. If boxers can do it, perhaps a heavyweight manager can come out of retirement for one last hurrah.. In the week when a children's story won the Whitbread Prize for fiction, anybody trying to make sense of the grown-up world of English football would find a knowledge of fairy-tales and fables quite useful.

Alice in Wonderland and the Emperor's New Clothes would be particularly handy.After sundry recent embarrassments, the Football Association announced it was to clean up the game, that its chief executive, Adam Crozier, would "crack down" on hooliganism and campaign for better standards from football's overpaid young players. Yet faced with the York City chairman, who in 1999 formed a holding company specifically to bypass an FA rule designed to protect clubs from asset strippers, Crozier's FA is silent. The chairman, Douglas Craig, is now demanding £4.5m for the club and ground – for which he and fellow directors paid around £200,000 – or he will sell the ground, probably to property developers. If no buyer is found for the club, he will withdraw it from the Football League on April Fool's Day.The FA's rule deters financial exploitation by providing that if a club is wound up and its assets sold, any surplus is not paid to shareholders, but to other sporting or charitable institutions. In 1999, Craig wrote to all York City shareholders asking them to approve a transfer of their shares and the club's Bootham Crescent ground to a holding company, Bootham Crescent Holdings, because, he argued, the FA's rule made York insecure, and could "adversely affect" their ability to remain at Bootham Crescent. The transfer went ahead and earlier this month Craig, citing mounting debts at the club, revealed his £4.5m asking price. The avoidance of the FA rule means that if the club is wound up and the ground sold, the estimated £3.5m surplus after paying off the club's creditors would be shared by Craig and his three fellow directors, John Quickfall, Colin Webb and the former playing stalwart Barry Swallow, who together own 94.1 per cent of the holding company.This week I asked Paul Newman, the FA's head of communications, a series of questions about the FA's rule, sent also to Adam Crozier and the FA's lawyer, Nic Coward.

I asked whether it is correct that their rule, 34 (b), is designed to protect clubs and their grounds and why Coward recommended only three years ago that the rule was necessary and valuable enough to be retained. I also asked: "What, in general, is the FA's view on clubs forming holding companies which take charge of all the club's assets but are free of your rules? Does it not make your rules effectively impossible to maintain?" These questions were not deemed worthy of a reply, of any kind. York supporters appealing for help have met the same silence.This bizarre regulatory vacuum in football has been widely condemned. Alan Keen MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Football Group, said: "Football's biggest challenge is to protect clubs from asset strippers. The FA needs clear, strong, watertight rules, and to enforce them. This is ludicrous." Malcolm Clarke, chair of the Football Supporters' Association, said: "The York affair confirms our worst fears. We call upon the FA and the Minister for Sport to protect clubs – at least the FA should enforce the few rules it has."The threat to York came in the same week as the first meeting of the Independent Football Commission, the game's new self-regulatory body.

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