Graphic: Tony Cascarino's ultimate football weekend

No regrets. Ashley Young could have signed for Tottenham Hotspur, tomorrow’s visiting side to Villa Park, if they had followed up their interest by meeting Watford’s valuation two years ago. West Ham United did match Aston Villa’s bid, an initial £8 million rising to £9.65 million, but the winger preferred to move to the Midlands.

“They [Spurs] didn’t want to pay the fee and I’m delighted to have signed for Villa,” Young said. “The manager and the chairman told me how the club could move on and I’m delighted with the way things have gone.” So Tottenham’s loss was Villa’s gain? “You’ll have to ask them,” Young said. The Barclays Premier League table, with Villa in fourth place and Spurs down in twelfth, tells us everything.

As Villa’s top earner alights from his Bentley at Bodymoor Heath, the club’s palatial training ground, earrings glistening in the spring sunshine, it is easy to succumb to the expectation that you are meeting a bling king.

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Sometimes, amid the brilliance that makes him a contender for at least one of the player of the year awards, the England winger goes to ground too easily, scowling at referees even as he springs back up, ready to whip in another of his trademark free kicks.

Yet ask Young’s team-mates about him and you start to understand the resilience that led him from rejection as a teenager to the cornerstone of a team on the verge of qualification for the Champions League. “He’s unbelievable,” Martin Laursen, the Villa captain and defender, said. “I enjoy so much watching Ashley Young. He’s so talented and he gets a lot of free kicks against him, but he just gets up.

“His attitude is great. His personality is very humble and I like that in him. As a footballer, he wants to learn and, even though he’s played so well for so long now, he still takes it so seriously every time he plays.”

Young laughs when told of Laursen’s appraisal. “That comes from my mum and my dad [Sharon and Luther],” he says. “They’ve always instilled that into me and any time I step out of line they keep my feet on the ground. That’s been my upbringing — never to get too big for your boots. I don’t think they would let me.”

Nor would his team-mates. More than half the Villa team could be dreaming of a 2009-10 campaign in which they break into the Champions League, then fly off to the World Cup finals in South Africa. But even when Martin O’Neill, the Villa manager, raced on to the Goodison Park pitch in December to be overheard telling Young that he was “a genius” and “world class” after two breathtaking goals had helped to overcome Everton, the 23-year-old was not allowed to get above his station.

“For the next week or two in training, that kept coming out,” Young says with a grin. “That’s the way the boys are. If I fell over a ball in training, it’d be, ‘World class, that, Ash, world class.’ You just have to take it, laugh it off and carry on.”

Watford dismissed Young as too lightweight at 16, but, after he asked to carry on training two nights a week, he soon showed his mettle. “I was a really late developer — I had a growth spurt when I was about 19,” he says. “When you’re told you’re not getting taken on it’s heartbreaking, but it depends how you bounce back. I just set out to show them that I was good enough and within a year I’d been offered a professional contract.”

Such resilience is a trademark of O’Neill’s teams. From the manager’s playing days with Nottingham Forest and Northern Ireland, to the teams he has inspired to overachieve — Wycombe Wanderers, Leicester City, Celtic and Villa — O’Neill has been a catalyst for success. Team spirit plays a big part, so making sure that the players’ personalities blend contributes to this evolution.

People have been questioning whether Villa, who returned from a break in Dubai this week after dropping eight points out of nine in the Barclays Premier League and being knocked out of two cup competitions, have the staying power to retain their top four place. But, as they entertain Spurs, with the possibility that Arsenal will have stolen fourth place the previous day, the lack of experience within Villa’s exciting young squad is offset by that in the dugout.

John Robertson, the assistant manager, is not averse to reminding Young of what he and O’Neill achieved three decades ago as part of the Forest team who sprung as if from nowhere to win the European Cup in successive seasons. “Yes, he keeps telling me what he’s won,” Young says, with a laugh. Has Robertson told him that, having created Trevor Francis’s goal in the 1979 final against Malmö, he scored the winner against Hamburg 12 months later? “Yes, I do know that as well. He has mentioned it,” Young says. “I love watching the Champions League. It’s the competition everybody wants to play in.

“We just want to do well in the next game or two, then the next month or two, and I believe we can get there.”

How fixed are top four?

Manchester United have finished in the top four (and, indeed, the top three) every season since 1991-92; Arsenal have ended in the top four since 1996-97; Chelsea since 2002-03 and Liverpool since 2005-06.

Since 1996-97, the “big four” have filled at least three of the top four finishing places. The “intruders” have been Newcastle United, Leeds United (three times each) and Everton (once).

Everton were the last “outsiders” to finish fourth, in 2005, Newcastle the last to finish third, in 2003, and the last to finish second, in 1997.

The last time none of the big four finished in the top four was 1963, when Everton, the champions, were followed in the table by Tottenham Hotspur, Burnley and Leicester City.

At least one of United and Liverpool have finished in the top two for 33 of the past 36 seasons, yet only twice in that period have they both finished in the top two.

Words by Bill Edgar