Villa then embarked on a wretched run of two wins in 21 matches, plummeting down the table and stinking the place out with a strain of football that yielded an average of less than half a goal per Premier League game.
In the third chapter of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon gave two reasons why the slavery into which the Romans had tumbled under Augustus and his successors left them more wretched than any previous human slavery.
Over glasses of water in a Philippine cafe in a Doha suburba populated by migrant workers, the women laid bare their wretched six-month odyssey, which has left them on the brink of despair and repatriation.
Yet we've long run out of descriptors for the light-socket hairdo made famous by wretched, slimy, reptilian boxing promoter Don King.
I went for a short walk to the shops yesterday, and in just those few minutes I bumped into two people worrying intensely about how to get everyone to vote Labour, and what hell it will be if the wretched Tories get in again.
Then there is its American, dear-god-hide-it-in-the-attic sibling, a wretched creature offering a mere 34g of satisfaction.
The film was called La Haine (Hate) and was the story of three young men in one of the wretched housing projects outside Paris, commonly referred to as la banlieue.
His wretched failings as a manager were cruelly exposed.
But on a wretched evening the champions lifted a cloud after two defeats to grind out a win that puts them within four points of the leaders, Harlequins.
With a hundred in Perth and a bowling performance that leaves him with more wickets on tour than James Anderson, the Durham man is perhaps England's sole genuinely bright spot of a wretched tour.
It is the dividing line between the wretched conditions of the banlieues, the suburbs outside the city, and the relative affluence of central Paris.
