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Maybe he should take a chance on Bree?

No man is a Nyland.

I’m not looking forward to this in the slightest. I will only watch out of habit and because I’m home alone with the young’un. Had the wife been home and suggested we knit flowers and watch a musical about menstrual cycles together while holding hands I’d probably take it as an excuse not to watch the damn thing.

Just going back to the RDM discussion. For me, it always felt that the losses and draws with RDM were unlucky, and with Bruce, for the most part the wins seem lucky and the draws expected.

This is one of the reasons I think brendon Rodgers would be a good fit. Some people think he would not come and manage in the championship but, let's be honest, it's at least in a par with the SPL in terms of quality. With the right vision he would jump at the chance. Bruce is a seige manager - dig in and battle hard against better teams to bring them down to your level. This doesn't work when you are the ones with the better players. You need to be hammering home the quality advantage to be successful.

I'm in a funny place in regards to Wagner. I think it was incredible that he got Huddersfield promoted. More incredible that he kept them there. Small club, minimal budget - the ultimate underdogs. But then I think about Steve Bruce and his promotion of underdogs, and even Owen Coyle getting Burnley into the PL. It's one of those where it's impossible to tell. If he gets a chance here and fails, it's a bad decision. If he goes somewhere else and succeeds it was a bad decision too. The one caveat, and it's not just Bruce but applies to a lot of other managers and players, that it's one thing being at a small club and fighting as the underdog, and something completely different being at a big club - the biggest in this division - and the expectation that comes with that. When Man Utd go to Huddersfield it's like an FA Cup 3rd round match. The home fans are well up for it because there's a chance of a giant-killing. You don't get that at Villa Park.

Gimme gimme gimme a manager before midnight.

No, thats still shit

Equaliser masked what was an extremely poor performance. Win, lose or draw, Bruce has to go at the end of this.

How is it skewed? Our current form is, out of our last 9 fixtures we have won one game. That’s a fact. That one win was against the mighty Rotherham! Which makes it even worse!

Mentioned in the Bundesliga thread but got a weekend taking in Stuttgart v Werder Bremen and Frankfurt v Hannover either side of the Canstatter Wasen beer festival. Can't wait!

Yet another example of Villa placing a mediocre player on a whopping salary. 40k per week for him is shocking. We still to this day throw money around like we are a big premier league club. Nobody in charge seems to have got the memo that we are not a big club but a mediocre also ran with a limited budget.

He said Shock and awe, not shocking and awful.

Typical Bruce, playing a retired goalkeeper up front...

I respect your right to Post whatever but personally I wish people would shut up about his parents. Especially when it’s “ a bloke says there’s a rumour that...” In my view it’s distasteful whether used as a criticism or a defence. Nobody other than him knows how that affects him, and unless he chooses to refer to it it shoukd ( IMO) be left alone.

What a cockwomble this Ian bloke is, some journo clearing in the woods from Wycombe

26 pages of match thread. 20 of which were ABBA puns. Says it all really.

Bolasie finally “Been shown the instructions by the goalkeeper coach” ????? you couldnt make it up.

MAKE A **** SUB YOU ABSOLUTE C U N T

Nyland for the goal was there or thereabouts.

I still can't quite get over him having dropped all of our wingers so that he could play people who aren't wingers in their positions. He wants all of the front six he's got now on the pitch and it doesn't work.

No? I'll get my coat...

I've seen the likes of this before.......it all over for him The sooner the obvious decision is made the better. Time is not going to correct this.

Bruceball= sign 2 wingers, play no wingers

Septmebrr

I was speaking to a friend about this the other day funnily enough. Under RDM, we actually played some nice stuff and I always thought we were unlucky when we didn't draw/win. Then, Bruce came in and we were winning games when we didn't play well. The problem is, this will only ever last so long. Bruce has no idea how to set this team up and there is absolutely no long term strategy. Should he get another transfer window, he'll just go out and buy the best players he thinks are available regardless of which positions we need to strengthen or how the team is set up to play tactically. Every game this dinosaur is invovled in is a game wasted. We're going nowhere under this unintelligent clown.

You don't turn a corner after 100 games, so no.

QT researcher 1: 'Mogg says he'll do Question Time as long as he isn't the weirdest most extreme most hated person on there' QT researcher 2: 'I'll give that wife beating racist piece of shit Rod Liddle a bell shall I?'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/09/27/jack-grealish-tottenham-think-would-get-place-england-squad/ Good interview this. Honesty about Spurs and admitting he hasn't hit the levels of last season yet.

Too young to remember Enckelman?

The thing is, if he wants to play with two up front and he wants to play Grealish, he can't also play with wingers - we don't have a defence that can withstand that. I'd suggested in the week he might drop the wingers in order to solve the problem - in fairness I didn't think he actually would.

Self loathing, masturbation, further self loathing, and wallowing in self pity. Usual weekend then

How can you tell he is on the wing it’s a list !

Exactly. I'm not a fan of jedinak at cb but blame the manager not the player. The same jedinak that scored the goal that took us to Wembley

Rumours jedinak was booed by villa fans when he got off the bus. If thats the case we are some absolute idiots following the club.

And to see him explain in detail what was wrong and not just spout some vague platitudes.

That is excellent, Brian. I’m nicking that for pre-game bantz with my brother.

I will admit that now, for alot of us, Bruce is like the partner you want to get rid of, so everything he/she does annoys us. Even if he/she has done nothing wrong. lol

Because an investigation delays and throws doubt on his confirmation, and that's all that matters. Especially because he will give Trump a bulletproof vest - he believes a president can't be charged for a crime. Kavanaugh will be confirmed and all today did was paint a paper thin veneer of legitimacy on proceedings. The entire thing is a farce, a charade. It's even more galling when you have the Republicans braying about political games being played when they blocked the confirmation of a judge themselves for an obscene time and patted themselves on the bank. And that guy wasn't an alleged attempted rapist. The US has deep, deep seated issues. The nonsense today was a mockery of democracy, in aid of a mockery of a legal system. It has a party that seems uniquely despicably in power, and lead by an imbecile.

"I won't quit" It's that attitude that got you into this mess...

So 30 hours a week free childcare. Given how bloody expensive it is, I think that's a cracking policy. It will enable parents to take less time off work, unburdened grandparents and give opportunities to people who are put off having children because of the cost. This is one of the sorts of things that make our society feel more fair. There are some insanely wealthy corporations and individuals in this country, asking them to pay a bit more and still prosper in order to make life a little bit better for everyone seems absolutely fair to me.

Not sure how much of this has carried over into the new game, but I had a strict setup that I'd do for every career mode in 18 that was about as optimised as you could get it. For the 6 scout instructions, I'd have: #1 - Any ability, any position, contract under 1 year, age 23-35 (used this to pick up expiring contract players on a freebie from January onwards). #2 - Promising, any position, age 16-21 (used this to find youth prospects). #3-#6 - All remaining scouts set to first team quality and whatever positions your squad was weakest in with all other parameters set to default. One thing that I hadn't realised previously and that the game doesn't make clear is that if you have a transfer scout and don't assign him to a specific country, you can have him scout players across multiple countries (you have to manually search for these players yourself and select the "scout player" option under each individual one). Found this useful to cover the "lesser" leagues, so I'd always have my first 5 scouts assigned to the strongest countries and 1 that I could send wherever I wanted (if you keep that last scout unassigned he can even be used to scout additional players in the countries you're already scouting, above the restricted limit). Speaking of "manual" scouting, I found this the best way to get young prospects if you don't mind spending the time on it and know what you're looking for. You can actually find out almost instantly without scouting if a player is worth picking up doing the following: Look for players in a position or league you want using the search function, set the age range from 16-21 (might be worth doing a few separate search in increments of two years i.e. 16-17, 18-19, 20-21 as there is a limit on the number of players this search returns, so if there's a large number of matches then some will be excluded). When the search is done, if you click on an individual player to bring up their profile and they have any of the following text underneath them, then they're worth picking up: "Showing great potential" = their potential is between 80-84 "An exciting prospect" = potential between 85-89 "Has potential to be special" = potential 90+ It's worth noting that if a player's overall rating is 59 or less, this text won't be displayed regardless (the player will still have that same potential, but you won't be able to do this check until they have a rating of at least 60). The same applies once a player is aged 22+, the text won't appear even if the player has one of those high potentials. This can also come in useful when you're setting up your youth squad/scouting; if one of your youth scouts finds a player with a rating of 60+ but hasn't narrowed their potential yet, I would promote them to the senior team at this point and look at their individual info in the Squad menu, as they too will have the above text if their potential is high enough to fall into one of those categories. This is a great way of getting your own quality youth players into the first team faster and cuts back on the likelihood of having a bloated youth squad that you can't add more scouted youth players to. If the youth player I promoted doesn't have one of those pieces of text, I'd just release them. Be aware that, unless the function has been tweaked for 19, you were strictly limited to 2 player releases per season so to get round this I'd just save before I promoted a player, reload the game if they turned out to be naff then just cut them straight from the youth team where there's no release limits (you used to and should be able to release as many players as you want, I've never understood the rationale behind limiting this in later iterations).