Stan Collymore's agent has claimed  his  client  would 'jump  at  the  chance'  of coming back to Aston Villa and said the former England  striker  would  even train for nothing to prove himself to Martin O'Neill.

Collymore - who has not played since 2001 - has spent the summer trying to regain fitness with a view to returning to football in just over a month and he has set his sights on coming back at the highest level.

The 35-year-old failed to justify his #7 million tag in the three years he spent at Villa, scoring just 15 goals and making more headlines for his depression and his antics off the pitch than his prowess on it.

But a reinvigorated Collymore is determined to prove his critics wrong and has been working hard since August to regain fitness for one last chance at the Premiership.

He is in Tenerife in an intensive training camp where he is working with the coaches who set rower James Cracknell on the road to Olympic glory.

And his representative, Simon Kennedy, is adamant the Villa fan will be back in a matter of weeks, doing what he used to do best. "He is not coming back to play anything but Premiership football,"

Kennedy said. "He will be doing that by mid-November and not just ready to train - ready to score goals."

Kennedy revealed that a chance to right the wrongs of his first disastrous stay with Villa would be a dream come true.

"The time he spent there was a massive disappointment to him, he would love the opportunity to go back and set the record straight," he said.

"Gareth Barry is still one of his closest friends, they are in regular contact and he has a lot of sympathy with the club he supported as a boy. Without giving away his whole email address, claret features very prominently in it."

For Collymore, the combination of the club he loves and the manager he respects above all others is irresistible.

O'Neill oversaw something of a renaissance in Collymore's career when he brought him to Leicester City in 2000 and the striker responded by scoring a hat-trick on his home debut.

"There is a group of clubs he would be prepared to come to train with for a couple of weeks to show what he can do," Kennedy continued.

"Villa are definitely one of those clubs. If there was an invitation to do that, he would jump at it.

"Liverpool was when he started to feel the depression, he felt just empty and when he was at Villa, they got him in the worst mental state of his career. He looks back on that with real disappointment.

"It was only when he left Villa and joined Leicester and began to work with Martin that he picked up again. When Martin left and Peter Taylor came in, the problems started once more."