Very Specific Football Question No.35: Do Aston Villa’s players need a cuddle?

The sight of Gabby Agbonlahor sat in an expensive hotel room on the night of Aston Villa’s relegation, with his baseball cap on back to front and two scantily-clad women on top of him, may be the image that comes to define the farce of the Midlands club’s season.

Laughing gas canisters litter the carpet, a copy of Grazia sits on a miniature coffee table and, in another photo, the one-time England international is seen gleefully removing the trousers of a random man.

The 29-year-old club captain has been duly suspended by Villa for these misdemeanours, but should he be receiving sympathy instead?

What these images really portray is a player so devastated by the demise of his childhood club that he has been forced to fabricate his own laughter.

A man so stressed by Villa’s nightmare season that he has started reading women’s magazines.

A professional so committed to the fitness regime the club had recently put him on that he now determinedly insists on carrying at least one woman at all times.

While Agbonlahor’s antics might look like fun to some, to anyone who has studied the club’s recent travails they betray the unmistakable signs that he is the latest victim of a crippling condition that has shaken football.

It is known as Playing for Villa Syndrome. Or simply, PVS.

Common symptoms of PVS include becoming increasingly bad at football while behaving like a complete div and - in extreme cases - wearing hats the wrong way round.

Born-and-bred Brummies are especially vulnerable to its debilitating effects, which become more pronounced following heavy defeats for the club.

One of the initial victims of the illness was 20-year-old Jack Grealish, who suffered a massive bout of PVS back in November when he was filmed drunk off his head on a night out in Manchester following a 4-0 defeat to Everton.

While some pundits argued at the time that the Solihull-born starlet was just “being silly”, the backwards baseball cap seen in video footage was a tell-tale sign that something more sinister was afoot.

Grealish is believed to have been suffering from the condition even before the season started, after he collapsed paralytic on a summer holiday to Tenerife following inebriated contemplation of a 2015/16 starting line-up without Christian Benteke and Fabian Delph.

Micah Richards, another boyhood Villa fan, also showed mild symptoms of PVS when he accompanied Agbonlahor on a wild night to a Dubai nightclub last month – an evening that ended with the duo watching a Janet Jackson concert in an effort to take their minds off impending relegation.

Then there was poor Joleon Lescott, whose PVS manifested itself in the bizarre and deeply tragic tweeting a photo of an expensive Mercedes mere minutes after a 6-0 home defeat to Liverpool.

But perhaps the most heartbreaking part of PVS is that its sufferers are chastised, rather than supported, by those in the football community.

When Lescott intimated he was relieved when Saturday’s loss at Manchester United confirmed Villa’s demotion to the Championship – calling it a “weight off the shoulders” – the club’s fans were so angry that they literally began “offering him out” for a fight on social media.

But while mindless violence may offer Villans fans some temporary relief, it will not solve the issue. What Lescott, Richards, Grealish and Agbonlahor really need right now is a hug, and not the kind of hug you get from a scantily-clad woman.

PVS is real, and it’s evidently contagious. Villa need to stamp it out, or else their plummet down the divisions might never end.

Follow @darlingkevin on Twitter

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