BigJim

10 minutes ago, useless said:

Not jumping the gun on the fee being accepted, because Fulham's official site has confirmed it.

Sure, but they accepted Norwich's bid as well didn't they?

Has the lad himself actually put pen to paper yet?  ITSOTP?

This doesn't seem to be reported anywhere else but the Mail? Everybody else just saying bid accepted. Not on the os of course, although they report Clark gone.

Hope we're not jumping the gun.

太棒了！ 非常开心！感谢托尼！

(or words to that effect)

2 minutes ago, VillaChris said:

McCormack has scored his 20 plus goals at Fulham last two seasons...run by me where they finished in the league....barely avoiding relegation I think.

 

Yeah but we're not asking him to play centre half and rush back goalie as well.

10 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

There's way too much pressure on Grealish and Ayew to create.

We literally have two players in the whole squad capable of creating chances or doing something special. It's ludicrous.

Grealish is at the stage of his career where he should be coming on for 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and learning from the experienced players around him. He should be the ace up our sleeve and someone that we bring on to baffle the opposition. 

To go into the season relying solely on him from an attacking midfield perspective is spectacular mismanagement and is an indictment on the standard of our playing squad.

We need 5 new players. 3 of these should be brought in to compliment Jack and help create from midfield/attack.

Worried.

Me too. But I don't agree that he should be used as an impact sub. If we have too little creativity as it is, we certainly can't afford to start with Jack on the bench. Besides, he has enough experience to be a regular starter now.

Perhaps he needs to take more risks. I see him gliding past players, but too often then playing the safe pass.

On 30/07/2016 at 11:04, andym said:

but thats mainly due to the fact its the only way he will get the ball. He's definitely not going to get it off Gestede!

Seems to me it's the way he prefers to play, spends far too much time looking for the ball 40+ yards from goal, and then trying a Roy of the Rovers solo act.

18 hours ago, Daweii said:

It's hard for him to play super attacking when Gestede is an elephant that has no positional awareness and Ayew (not his fault) has to keep coming deep into midfield to get the ball because most of our players aren't attack minded. Grealish could run the flanks all day and cross the ball in all day with ease, but when there is no one there to receive it he has to go down different avenues that cause us playing sideways.  

I agree Gestede is not the most mobile, but still I don't remember many aerial crosses from open play for him to attack. He clearly doesn't work if we want to keep the ball on the deck.

9 hours ago, AntrimBlack said:

Nothing is ever definite in transfer windows, but this is the closest we will get to confirmation of the clubs intention to keep him, and also confirms there is no release clause.

Very good news.

Also them saying that only Gana had a release clause. Which should put to rest the fears, if there were any, that someone might snatch Amavi, or even Traore, from us.

8 minutes ago, TRO said:

It seems ironic that after all this time......he is still on trial.

Ironic indeed, but RDM has to be pragmatic, I think. If we are stuck with the player, may as well see if we can get some return from our investment. I'm sure most of us agree the chances are practically nil, but supposing Gabby puts the hard yards in during training and otherwise keeps his head down, RDM's open minded policy may just produce something.

4 minutes ago, Daweii said:

Maybe him keeping a low profile is for the best. 

I mean every manager recently has a been a bit of a chatter box in comparison and it's almost made things worse. We need managers that only talk when the media speaks to them and also is selective with words. Recently every manager we have had has just talked too much about how the team will be vastly better next time out, yet when it doesn't happen the fans turn sour. 

We have our chatter box in the lovable and adorable man from China Tony Xia, we don't need RDM to say anything this season. 

Agreed, though once the season starts we've got the before and after press conferences, that amounts to a quite lot of the manager in the media, like it or not. But yes, I will also be happy he keeps in the background the rest of the time.

6 minutes ago, TRO said:

A lot of ifs,buts and maybe's.

some of the most failed players in our history.......always had a chance.

RDM the new broom being as fair as he can. But even he must know that it's an awful long way back for Gabby with the fanbase. Even to risk him in a big game (and every game is a big game this season) is taking a hell of a chance, in that the odds are that the player will screw up and the fans will be incensed. That's not going to help anybody.

I can't see him risking it at VP. Maybe on the bench away from home, see how that goes for a month or two.

18 minutes ago, KSV said:

------------------------------Gollini--------------------------------

NEW RB--------Elphick-------------Okore------------Amavi

------------------------------Tshibola-------------------------------

-----------Westwood--------------------Gardner----------------

-----------------------------Grealish-------------------------------

----------------Ayew----------------NEW STRIKER-----------

If we sign Morrison.. he can replace Westwood

 

 

Doubt he would work hard enough. Whatever folk on here think of Westwood, he puts a shift in. 

Do you think we could afford to have Morrison and Grealish in the same team? 

2 hours ago, wilko154 said:

But there is something the owner can do... He can say no thanks we will keep the player.

I don't understand this whole panic about losing Ayew & Amavi, do they both have release clauses?

If, as it seems, Gana has one, I'd think it's pretty likely that all last summer's signings of similar value would have one.

2 hours ago, Chindie said:

Why of course? You say this and then don't explain it. All terrorism is political, BTW. It's what makes it terrorism.

There are other groups of non-religious affiliation that 'couldn't be negotiated with'. The Red Army Faction, Aum Shinrikyo for instance. Not all terrorist causes end at the negotiating table. Many don't. There's dozens of them.

And being international isn't new or special either. Various Palestinian groups attacked all over the place (and not always just Jews). A bunch of communist groups attacked all over the world in the 70s (notably the Japanese Red Army). Aum Shinrikyo drew followers from across the world (that has fuckloads of Russian followers for instance cooking up sarin gas and intended to produce tons of it).

It's not new or special. It's just the flavour of the month.

Disagree.

If terrorism is politically inspired, it has a possible negotiable, political solution, even if it is never reached. Otherwise it is not political, by definition: politics is the art of the possible.

Islamist terrorism is inspired in religion not politics. It is the non negotiable variety.

I find your description of it as "flavour of the month" as simply breathtaking... I'm afraid I have to retire from the debate. 

9 minutes ago, Chindie said:

What actual effect does that have though? They're committing acts of violence for an aim which has a political element. The motive is less tangible but motive isn't that important in its details. ISIS aim to establish a global caliphate and fulfill a doomsday prophecy because Allah says so in their opinion. The IRA wanted a united free Ireland, because they believe that to be right. The scale is different and the source is different, but whether it's religiously inspired or nationalist ultimately doesn't change much.

It's not even indoctrination, there's been numerous quite stringent left wing/communist terror groups who were rabid on their beliefs. Their book had Marx on the cover, not Muhammad of course, but it's the same thing ultimately.

There was/is an agenda to treat Islamist terror as special and requiring special different action from other types of political violence... But fundamentally it doesn't. It isn't special. There are inspirations, causes, and effects. You deal with the latter as and when, and tackle the former 2 in an ongoing effort to kill the motive.

Of course it requires special and different action. The inspirations and causes are so wildly different from traditional political terrorism...the effects so more far reaching. You can negotiate with Basque separatists... you would't expect to have to combat the Tamil Tigers in Argentina. How you can say this is not different is beyond me.

12 minutes ago, Chindie said:

It works.

I studied this stuff and have an ongoing interest in it. I understand the numbers etc.

But today on my lunch I wandered through Birmingham city centre and, because I'm mad clearly, went into the Bullring. That's about a at over a miles perhaps including the walk back. I noticed more coppers than I've seen in town any time except when the Queen opened the tram extension earlier this year. I also noticed far more obvious security in the Bullring. And on the way home yesterday I had an unmarked cop car blitz past me with more sirens behind.

I'm a rational guy. I still immediately thought some Qur'an inspired violence has been discovered for a split second.

I heard terrorism called performance violence recently. Seems fitting as the days and incidents go by.

Thing is, terrorism has historically been linked to local or regional political aims. Scare people into conceding what you want.

The islamist stuff has added a whole new and more terrifying dimension to the acts.

15 minutes ago, Chindie said:

There are over a billion Muslims in the world. If they were all frothing at the mouth to bomb themselves into Allah's arms and take as many infidel whores with them as they could we'd know about it.

So... the combined numbers of all the Islamist groups around will be a tiny fraction of that billion. ISIS, which is able to capture and hold (admittedly largely ungoverned) swathes of land, is estimated as having at most 250,000. Al Qaeda, less than 45k globally. Etc. These figures are large but compared to the amount of Muslims it's nothing. If you expand that to include anyone of a fundamentalist attitude who hasn't taken up arms then the number gets large... But the problem there is Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are fundamentalist but I don't think the entire population of either is ready to blow themselves up at the drop of a hat. Some of them will, for sure. But clearly not many statistically because of they were there'd be exponentially more attacks than there are just by sheer weight of numbers.

My point is this though. There aren't hard and fast numbers with Islamist sympathisers. But it's hard to argue against the issue being a minority of Muslims.

The perception of it being more is a combination of factors. ISIS has been a 'success' of marketing itself and has done the al Qaeda strategy of being a 'brand name' for Islamic word removed -ery on a grander scale, meaning we've seen more attacks. But in the stats the attacks are still barely of relevance (which I'll come to). But yes are seeing more, for now.

The media altered post 9/11 as they realised this shit sells viewership, so they doubled down on every chance they were given, and they push every incident into the narrative - watching the Beeb last Friday they were desperate for that to have a ISIS flag somewhere and were near disappointed when it wasn't. Fundamentally the attack hits the same notes, a nutter slaughters innocents, but they couldn't ultimately market it as 'another Muslim attack!' so they tired of it as did the audience (although interestingly as these go on, eventually the impact will die. High school shootings in the US are waining in coverage because they're the norm now and only the really grim ones get much coverage). You also have 24hr news always looking for the latest story, and the preponderance of eye witness on the scene video.

Also, consider what your exposure to Islam is. Every time Islam is in the news it's bad. Usually its the latest car bomb in Baghdad. More often recently it's the latest slaughter in continental Europe. Soon, sadly, it will be another incident on British soil. But there's the subconscious effect of that. You're hearing the same topic, generally, every day more or less, with some new horrible thing from somewhere in the world. And it doesn't take an enormous amount of people to do that - if ISIS had one adherent a day blow himself up somewhere we'd all be long dead before they ran out of men. That's 1 group. It's not a surprise you start to feel Islam has a bigger problem than reality actually shows (note, I wholeheartedly agree it does have a big problem, but not down to the numbers of mentalists). This is also why I think Islam has skin in the game of ridding itself of these fools, and not just washing it's hands of them as 'not Muslims' - they're poisonous to PR. And they know it too, they want animosity to Islam.

And finally, there's the issue of terrorism itself. It's designed to do this. Terrorism aims to project influence beyond the immediate. It's point isn't solely to kill (in many cases historically the killing is incidental to the point, almost). The point is to use the violence to impact society more widely, with fear mostly, to change things. Each act is magnified, made worse than the stats really show it is, and sits heavy on the mind, making each feel more impactful and ultimately making the problem feel bigger than it truly is. I don't wish to diminish the problem, because it certainly is one, but when you're talking about perceptions of the problem, with the inference being in essence there's thousands/millions more of these words removed than we say there are, is worth raising. I always recall reading a book at uni that had a whole section on this phenomenon and rattled off ludicrous facts about it - Americans were more likely to die drowning in a public toilet than in international terrorism incidents in every year bar 2001, you were more likely to be killed by your trousers, etc etc... But the scourge of public toilets and trousers doesn't seem to have perception of a rising threat...

Well done for that massive post, many very valid points. And I would just like to emphasize the last one: while the threat of homicidal public toilets and articles of clothing may be statistically greater at present, I would wager it won't be for much longer.

19 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

Well since we were talking about Muslims in general, I used the entire Muslim population...and not just the population in Indonesia. In any case 450 out of 1 million Swedish Muslims is roughly 0.05% of the Swedish Muslim population, so you're right it's a slightly different percentage. Still a minuscule minority by most definitions I'd hope.

Off topic, but I have at least learned that minuscule is the correct spelling, not miniscule (though the latter is apparently more widely used).

6 minutes ago, 7392craig said:

New manager is nothing new. 

Had to laugh at this. But at least we're not as bad as Sunderland (are we?)

9 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

I agree with all of this, but it's quite different from when you questioned if they were a minuscule minority which is what I was trying to point out.

If you perceive it as a different point then I probably expressed myself badly. 

29 minutes ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

I was really looking forward to everyone pulling in the same direction for a change. I grew sick of being involved in such a miserable, stagnant football club. Unfortunately, nothing appears to have changed because far too many people have zero self control or patience. 

We wanted our Villa back. We got it back, together. Within a couple of months some are back to pissing and moaning again. It's your right to do so but I've had enough of it to be honest. Perhaps that's a problem with me.

Doug, I'm sorry: it wasn't my intention to upset you or anybody else. But if you're only happy when everyone takes the same stance as you, perhaps a football message board is not the ideal place to hang out.

16 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

If you totaled up all of ISIS' fighters worldwide and even throw in Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Boko Haram for good measure, they would amount to less than 0.001% of the total Muslim population and that's me being generous by leaving out 1 or 2 extra 0's. I don't know what your definition of miniscule minority is but that more than satisfies mine.

I imagine your numbers are probably in the ballpark, but the point was simply that we may be in danger of underestimating the numbers of players (and potential players) if we dismiss them as wackos.  It is largely irrelevant how small a percentage of the universal Muslim population they comprise: their numbers are growing (that's my perception at least). And their levels of support should not be underestimated either.

I speculate that things are not going according to plan in several ways, but on balance I trust the management will get it mostly right in the next couple of weeks.

4 minutes ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

Completely unjustifiable nonsense. 

Did RDM organise the friendly? If not he's well within his rights to cancel it if he sees it as redundant. Regardless wouldn't letting U21's go suggest we're looking to sign more players rather than none? 

Headless chickens. This forum is basically unreadable at the moment. 

1. You're quite right, it's nonsense. But the cancellation is the nonsense that inspired it.

2. If he saw it as redundant, yes within his rights, but in that case he should have cancelled it ages ago.

3. Lighten up man .

15 minutes ago, Richard said:

Very poor excuse.  Surely we have some youngsters that will be staying with us that he can get a look at?

Only thing I can think of is that ALL the players are up for grabs if only we can find takers. Desperate times.