Just after finishing the earlier piece on Nathaniel Mendez-Laing, I looked on the messageboard and saw a thread titled Tony Villars and immediately thought, don’t say this absolute bastard of a year has claimed another Cardiff City victim? Apparently, it has though with someone on said board who knows a family member confirming that our former winger died in his sleep overnight.
2020 will be remembered for the pandemic that blighted it, but its also been a year that has seen far too many former City players pass away with a lot of them leaving us well before their time – it started as it meant to go on with the death of Chris Barker on New Years Day.
At sixty eight, Tony Villars doesn’t quite fall into the latter category, but it is still a young age for someone to go.
For a short while in the mid seventies, the thing I looked forward in anticipation to more than anything else before a City game was that Tony Villars would reprise his never to be forgotten performance against Crystal Palace in a relegation shoot out game in 1974.
It was a forlorn hope, that night was the highspot of his career and although there’d be the odd performance which stirred the memory, the truth was I was pinning my hopes on a player who was great fun to watch and would produce two or three inspired moments a game, but he generally lacked the consistency to be a big influence in them.
What is indisputable though is that in what I’d say was the biggest game of his career in terms of what was riding on it, he did the business and how. Ten years ago I did a piece on here called Tony Villars’ finest hour (and a half) which recalled that night – I was too young to really take in the splendour of “the Farrell match” nearly ten years earlier, but I certainly appreciated what I saw on the night Tony Villars relegated Malcolm Allison’s Crystal Palace.
Three Welsh caps were won by Villars on the back of that Palace game and the one against England was somehow typical of him from the wild hack he had at a ball while guarding the post at a corner which saw it roll gently into the net underneath his flailing foot through to the magical, jinking dribble which took him past a stack of opponents who had probably never even heard of him until that Palace match which was ended by Emlyn Hughes throwing himself head first at the City man because it was the only way he could stop him!
I can remember my incredulity that the player who had been so influential towards the end of the 73/74 campaign was unable to nail down a regular starting place in what was a relegation team the following season. There was a brief reminder of what Villars was capable of at the start of 75/76 in the Third Division, but he was very much a bit part player in the Alston/Evans promotion team and left City for Newport County where he played for a season before leaving the professional game at just twenty five.
Injuries played their part in the decline of someone with the talent to play regularly at second tier level, at least, but he could never sustain the level of performance which made him my favourite City player for a couple of years.
RIP Tony Villars, when you were really on song, you were brilliant.
