The main article and some of the responses are very interesting. However, the idea that in general Villa fans are starting to get twitchy and are losing faith in the new regime does seem a bit at odds with the news that season ticket sales are at higher levels than last season. That suggests an increase in confidence, and I think an article claiming to detect a general trend of opinion amongst Villa fans needs to explain this seeming contradiction.
I was particularly struck at the suggestion (threat?) that, if MON doesn't produce more magic this season, fans will start protesting and bringing out banners. This reminded me of the events in the third year of Alex Ferguson's managership at Man U, when the fans unfurled a banner at the end of the season saying: "Three years of excuses and it's still crap. Ta ra Fergie." Fans are by their nature impatient and have a simplistic view of what is needed to make their team successful - buy us the best players, play fantastic football and win lots of trophies and titles. Simple. When it doesn't happen, as, sadly, for most clubs it won't, they start to complain and the club's owners then have a choice. It is easy to sack the manager and get a new one in - ideally, a popular former player, as Newcastle did with Keegan. But, as the Ferguson example shows, fans are not necessarily very good at judging the worth of a manager,and the other choice is for clubs to back their own judgement and stick with their manager through periods of unpopularity as teams like Man U and Everton (and in a different way Arsenal - though Wenger is never criticised by the fans) have notably done. Those few clubs are rare in their approach to supporting the manager and, as ChrisVillan says, it remains to be seen whether Randy Lerner will support MON through times of unpopularity with the fans. So many clubs go for the option of switching managers frequently - Spurs, Man C, West Ham (and, in a former era, one deadly Doug) for example - without obvious success. But it is an easy way to appease the fans.
I would like to think that the regime at Villa is not so weak and that they will continue on the course they have set and create enough stability to enable us to build consistently season by season to a position where we can challenge the top teams. But nothing is predictable in football and I certainly wouldn't bet on it.
What I would bet on is that Villa fans will get impatient and call for MON's sacking. He must know that and Randy Lerner probably does. If Villa fans were to succeed in getting MON sacked, it would in my opinion count as a fairly spectacular foot-shooting operation.