No blues for departing Davies

Birmingham signing Curtis Davies has revealed he was ‘happy to see the back’ of former club Aston Villa after his January transfer move.

Central defender Davies had not made a league appearance for Villa since the 2009/10 season and had spent the earlier part of this term on-loan at Championship club Leicester City.

Davies appeared destined to link up with Leicester again before a swoop on January 28 by Villa’s rivals Birmingham kept the 25-year-old in the English Premier League.

“It’s good – good to be here. They’re a good set of lads and it seems a good club so I’m just ready to get going and try and play Premier League football again,” Davies said.

“I was on my way to Leicester and had got the paperwork done really and Villa called my agent late on in the evening and said Villa hadn’t signed off the papers and said the Blues had put in a permanent deal. I was obviously happy to come across and talk to Blues and happy to get the deal done.”

And there is no love lost between Davies and former club Villa, where he had been frozen out first by manager Martin O’Neill and then his successor Gerard Houllier.

“At the end of the day I hadn’t played a league game for Villa for eighteen months, so maybe if I was a regular in the side and had jumped ship to come to the Blues then that would’ve probably been a different thing,” he said.

“But it was more a case that they were happy to see the back of me and I was happy to see the back of them really. I wasn’t playing for them – I was just sitting there doing nothing and I wanted to go and play.”