"Find me a better firm" was the caption Steven Gerrard put out on his Instagram of a photo of himself and his backroom staff strolling back out for the second half at Goodison Park on Saturday.

Gerrard, Michael Beale, Tom Culshaw (technical coach) and Gary McAllister were all smiles with Villa 1-0 up, while Austin MacPhee (set-piece coach) and Paddy Moore (physical performance coach) were also in shot, as were new signing Robin Olsen and Aman Shergill, the club's physical performance scientist.

However, one man who supporters might not have recognised is Dr Martin Littlewood, seen scratching his ear between McAllister and Olsen.

It's understood that Littlewood, Villa's new first-team psychologist, arrived in December having worked with Gerrard, Beale, Culshaw and McAllister at Rangers.

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Prior to Rangers, Littlewood was at Leicester City and, before that, spent more than six years at Everton as their applied practitioner working with players.

Littlewood's career in football first began at Bolton Wanderers in July 2003 where he was a performance coach, and designed and implemented a psychological and lifestyle development programme for academy players and provided one-to-one support.

Providing an insight in Littlewood, Gerrard's assistant Beale said last year while at Rangers: "Martin Littlewood works with us as a psychologist. We did a lot of talking about the messages that we send in training, and the message that the manager sends in his meetings and the coaches in the unit meetings about staying on task and not looking too far ahead and at the league table."

During his time at Leicester, Littlewood worked with first-team players including Matty James, a player who suffered terribly with injuries.

In an interview with the Guardian, James said: "I started seeing Martin Littlewood [a sport psychologist]. When I first went to see Martin, I think I spoke for an hour and a half without him saying a word. I had tears in my eyes. It was just a release.

"The big thing that came out of our conversations was that he said to me, ‘You need to find your identity again.’ I said, ‘I don’t even know what that is any more.’

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"He talked about everything away from football, like my family, and he said, ‘That’s your identity. You’re not the footballer; the footballer is inside you.’

"It was eye-opening and I stopped thinking about things that I couldn’t control – because I’d been trying to control everything."

As for Littlewood's role at Villa, he's the quiet, understated man in the background who helps keep players mentally strong, both during the week and during matches which was typified as Villa showed great grit and determination to dig in to win 1-0 at Everton over the weekend.

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