Birmingham City and Aston Villa: Complete contrast between chairman

May 9 2009 By Mat Kendrick

BIRMINGHAM City’s chairman seems to have been on the box so much in the past week that I even mistook UKTV Gold for his own personal channel.

David Gold has been happy to appear in front of the cameras to bask in the glory of Blues’ promotion to the Premier League at the first time of asking.

But in fairness to the media savvy septuagenarian and co-owner David Sullivan they do not use the press merely for glory-hunting during the good times.

For all their perceived faults the Blues power-brokers tend to ‘front up’ to be scrutinised win, lose or draw and rarely go into hiding when the going gets tough.

Which begs the question, how often should football’s boardroom bigwigs be quoted in newspapers, beamed onto our screens or broadcast across the airwaves?

The reason I ask is that the two Daves’ regular supply of sound-bites is in stark contrast to the public utterances of their fierce rivals’ chairman 2.6 miles down the road.

Randy Lerner has always been a private man and has prided himself on an anti-Ellis approach, namely remaining in the background to let those more qualified do the talking.

But even by his own shy standards, Lerner has kept a lower Villa Park profile than Moustapha Salifou this year.

After giving annual media briefings in each of his first two seasons, the American’s silence has been, if not exactly deafening, then slightly disconcerting.