Giles Smith: Aston Villa really ought to take a minute to honour their Ozzy Osbourne legacy

Big Villa fan, of course, Black Sabbath’s frontman. And huge at Villa Park, his passing this week marked immediately by a club statement mourning the “world-renowned rock star and Villan”.

He has already been the subject of a tifo there – and what a tifo: mouth madly agape, spread fingers reaching out from the Holte End before a 4-2 Champions League victory over Celtic in January. “Up the Villa,” it said.

Most tifos, let’s face it, look like acts of lame blanket-spreading. This one was a game-changer for the format, practically three dimensional – the ABBA Voyage of tifos. Villa were 2-0 up after five minutes that night, and nobody who saw that terrifying thing hanging there was even remotely surprised. In fact, it’s a tribute to those Celtic players that they recovered at all, let alone got back into the game for a while.

Now, though, Villa Park is presumably going to need a mid-match minute of appreciation, or “clappo” as those of us close to the game and its rituals like to call it.

A chance, not just for Villa fans but for any members of the wider football family in attendance, to show their respects for one of the leading alchemists behind heavy metal, and the pioneer who took rock from the musical and lyrical complacency of the late Sixties hippy era to a place with many more black T-shirts in it.

In accordance with tradition, there will, I’m sure, be a strong call for going with the 76th minute, in honour of the singer’s age at his death. Sound logic, of course, yet would I be alone in thinking that, in this case, there might be something a bit formal about that choice? A bit stuffy, even?

Also, in whose head was Osbourne ever 76? Possibly his doctor’s, but ­certainly not his own.

Similarly, I’m imagining a lot of people, more on the music side, getting behind the ninth minute as the one in which to start the applause, nine being the number of albums Black Sabbath recorded with Osbourne on vocals.

Or perhaps the 27th minute, marking the number of consecutive weeks spent on the UK albums chart by the seminal Paranoid album from 1970.

I don’t know, though. Weeks on the charts? It feels a bit Paul Gambaccini to be caring about that kind of thing these days. And also not very Ozzy. And again, given heavy metal’s long-standing association with satanism – at least in the minds of certain record-burning fundamentalists – there will be those, I’m sure, who will argue Osbourne would be best served by a clappo in the 666th minute. Not for me, though.

Yes, he bit off a bat’s head that time. But yes, too, he thought it was ­rubber until he sank his teeth into it, and it surely speaks to Osbourne’s cross-generational approachability that Gothic horror was, for him, fundamentally a branch of showbusiness – and a rather hapless branch of it, at that. See also Alice Cooper, who seemed a lot less scary when you knew he combined the suggestion of vampiric tendencies with a four handicap at golf.

Also, football doesn’t often run to 666 minutes, not even these days, with the level of time added on.

Personally, I’d advocate most strongly for the 11th minute, to commemorate all those drummers Black Sabbath got through – Joe “Mama” Besser, Mick Shrimpton, John “Stumpy” Pepys… oh, no, wait. That was Spinal Tap.

In which case, maybe the 52nd minute, after the collected episodes of The Osbournes, in which Ozzy was essentially rebirthed to the world as a semi-rehabilitated and highly confused 21st-century reality TV star, along with his wife, Sharon, some of their offspring and various incontinent pets.

How about the 81st minute – the number of dates on Sabbath’s 2016 The End tour? Which, of course, wasn’t the end. “This is it. It’s definitely run its course,” as Ozzy said at the time.

Black Sabbath were back on stage this summer – at Villa Park, fittingly.

There’s only one thing that officially retires rock stars, and it’s not retirement. Anyway, thoughts?

Photograph by Michael Regan/UEFA/Getty