Martin O'Neill is to join forces with Randy Lerner, the Aston Villa owner, in a bid to persuade Gareth Barry to snub Liverpool and remain with the Midlands club. Villa have already rejected one £10 million bid from Anfield and there has been a war of words between O'Neill and Rafael Benitez over the possible deal.

The England midfielder is understood to be edging closer to the Villa Park exit door after ten seasons, but the Aston Villa manager will make one last bid to keep hold of him with talks in the next 48 hours.

"I wouldn't want to be saying how confident we are [of keeping Barry]," O'Neill said. "It's a different era we live in. We will see. All I know is he has never expressed one iota of unhappiness in my time at Villa Park. He might not have stayed that long had he been really unhappy before.

"We're going to be sitting down very shortly and discussing Gareth's future. We won't let this lie. I'm going to see the chairman in the next couple of days with a bit of luck and the two of us together might be able to persuade him to stay. I say persuade him - but he still has two years left on his contract.

"He has been particularly brilliant for us. We want to improve the team and our best chance of doing that is to keep our best players and adding some quality."

Despite the speculation surrounding Barry, O'Neill has vowed to make Villa an even more formidable force this summer after narrowly missing out on automatic qualification for next season's Uefa Cup.

"We've ended the season with 60 points and in most years that would have been enough to qualify automatically for Europe. Last season we would have walked it and even seventh place got automatically into Europe 12 months ago. So from that aspect it's disappointing but it shouldn't mask the fact that we've come on leaps and bounds from last season.

"To do it with the smallest squad in the Premier League has made it particularly impressive but that's something we would want to address in the summer. We've generally been lucky with injuries and would have struggled to cope had we experienced the problems some other clubs have had with injuries. And it is not rocket science to point out the squad as it stands would not be strong enough in depth to compete in Europe."