MessiWillSignForVilla

Baggies losing 2-0 to Southampton. Starting to look like the bottom four could be cut adrift from everyone else come the end of the season.

So how long after the match does Bruce say the win should "shut a few up"?

31 minutes ago, KenjiOgiwara said:

Between the deadline and this Jota stuff I've got a stupid question. Our squad as it stands... which players will be dropped from the 25 man squad? 

Wesley and Kalinic I assume. Also wouldn't be surprised to see either Lansbury or Nyland have their contracts terminated as they both have just one year left on their contracts too.

How the hell has Dallas got away with that?

21 minutes ago, SuffolkVillan said:

Samatta scores for Fenerbache! 

Scored on his League debut for us as well to be fair.

10 minutes ago, Okonokos said:

Sounds to me like we want more players but are restricted by FFP. Hopefully we can get rid of a few.

More likely to be due to squad size, you can only register 25 players, and we have 28 senior players now that Luiz, Davis and Konsa(?) no longer count as U21. We could register a 25 man squad with Wesley, Kalinic and Nyland/ Heaton likely to miss out, but would leave us with no room for any additions other than U21s, hence we need to sell.

58 minutes ago, NurembergVillan said:

For balance, here are some non-Nazi examples of quality Remembrancing...

 

Wow, and here I thought that David Squires cartoon was just a joke...

3 minutes ago, TheAuthority said:

What was on the T-shirt that Maddison held up?

Supposedly it's Leicester's club doctor (ex?) that died of cancer recently.

2 minutes ago, villalad21 said:

Did he actually say this??

 

Yes he did, but the point he was making was that the authorities don't respect them as they aren't "big enough", so they've given them a schedule where they'll be playing every two days over the next week or so.

31 minutes ago, Zatman said:

Was that Lansbury making a run into the box as well when Watkins scored  

It was, for me it's what made the goal, drew the defender freeing up the pass from AEG to Trez and then giving him time to line up the pass across to Watkins. All round a well worked goal.

lovely move!

Watkins coming on it looks like.

Brilliant finish and a good pass from Ramsey for the assist too.

4 hours ago, useless said:

 

The problem with this is it looks good out of context, but in context, it isn't that great, just kind of okay. As others have pointed out, this is likely xA/90 for players that have played 1000+ minutes, however his xA is around 27th in the league, which is still fairly high. You also have to consider that over half of his xA is from set pieces* and corners (according to understat - 3.01 xA from set pieces and corners, 2.72 xA from open play - this open play xA would drop him from 27th to 100th in xA of players with 1000+ minutes), which when looked at deeper shows that whilst his open play has a higher xA than his set pieces alone (2.72 v 2.49) his xA/Key Passes (passes that result in a shot) is higher for Set Pieces (0.25 v 0.17), which would indicate that from open play he provides a higher quantity of lower quality passes, and the inverse for set pieces.

Which essentially paints the picture that most of us already knew, Conor is a set piece specialist, and mostly average elsewhere. Specifically, he is a free kick specialist, as from the 6 players that I can see that took corners for us last season, Conor ranked 5th with an xA/KP of 0.04, with only El Ghazi's 0.03 ranking below. (This is partly due to the fact that corners are getting increasingly harder to score from, hence why so many teams now take short corners as they have a greater chance of goals). Having said that, I couldn't find how many corners each player took, so I couldn't how these numbers compare to the volume of corners taken, which could add further insight.

This is all to say, stats like xG and xA can be useful, however they are meaningless when used in isolation to compare players, and you need to dig down in to them to help formulate a greater picture of a player and what they offer to a team, and they also need a good sample size to be relevant, which is why xG for singular games is useless, whereas over an entire season it can give you an idea of team performance.

*I don't know why understat separates these out, I assume they are just free kicks.

5 minutes ago, Andy81 said:

None of our centre backs are from Portugal, so we'd need at least three.

You have Roderick, so would only need one more Portuguese CB to fit a traditional back four. I imagine the point wasn't that Wolves could field 11 Portuguese players in their current system, just that they could field something like a 4-5-1 with only Portuguese players if they signed another CB.

Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but the Milner stuff is twitter BS. It's based off one random account that claims the Liverpool Echo has said we're interested, but there is nothing on their website or social media pages.

Just now, Rodders said:

I'm curious as to who it was in reference to? Benrahma?

It was Rhian Brewster, the original said they had bid £25m for him.

2 hours ago, villan-scott said:

Anyone want to fact check this one? Crazy if true!

Assuming that TransferMarkt's stats are correct, amazingly it is true! Three GKs have saved penalties for us in the Premier League and kept a clean sheet, however, none of them at Villa Park. Bosnich in a 0-0 draw at Everton in 98/99,  Thomas Sorenson in a 2-0 win at Man City in 06/07 and Brad Guzan in a 1-0 win at Norwich in 13/14.

Funnily enough, it even holds up in the Championship and again with GK doing it away from home, with Nyland in a 1-0 win at Swansea in 18/19.

2 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Imagine how shit this would be if it were 11vs11.

Not very? Sheff Utd wouldn't have been camped in their own box for an hour if it was 11v11 and we would've had more chances.

2 minutes ago, sne said:

He's been spotted in the air above Villa Park 

Oh god, we don't have a good track record with parachutists.

Celtic supposedly only want around £15m for Kristoffer Ajer, I reckon we should try and tempt him here at that price, would make a good partner for Mings and can step up to midfield too. May be a bit fanciful though, as Milan are interested too.

Listening to Gary Neville right now;

Don't think it's a pen, but definitely enough in it to not get overturned.