romavillan

yep, could easily be 0 - 3, 0 - 5 or 0 -6 although i've been praying for a draw all day and then telling myself i'm insane to even hope...

What MON spent is right, HOW he spent it was the problem.

that's pretty much bang on, we're still in with a good shout with a return of 4 or 5 points from the next 3. 6 points, wins against reading and qpr, would mean we'd go into a run of games we can get points from out of the bottom 3 and with confidence. if we get turned over by reading and qpr in those games we are down.

yes, but not by signing a raft of average players who won't start a lot on 40k+ a week! i'd say a sping of players on 40k+ who start when fit is perfectly fine, with a couple over that amount too. it's all about the returns we get for the outlay.

if we get mullered tonight then it'll be an uphill battle to get the 5/6 points we need this month. if we play well then hopefully we'll kick on and get the points we need. another chelsea like result and we're doomed!

i'm not sure we had many other realistic ways of getting out of the shit we were in to be honest. far too many either average or underperforming players on huge salaries that only get paid by clubs with a sniff of the CL in our league or clubs who do not care about being massively loss making. we are neither of those things. if we stay up this season should be the lowest point in the transition from paying 60k a week to tossers to paying average 30k a week to players who give a shit. once we've got rid of all the overpaid underacheivers then it's time to really start the rebuilding and i'd expect us to start moving up the table agian. if we go down then the pruning will be more drastic and getting promotion in the first season becomes massively important. either way, in 1 or 2 years we shoudl finally have shaken off the hangover from overspending so much and start to rebuild in a more sustainable way.

IF we stay up i'd like to think lambert (did henke go to ingolstad or wherever? or what?) could dig up another player of benteke's class or two and we'd be better for it! it's not gonna be easy but if we stay up i'd think we'd be in a better positioon next season. if we go down then it's gonna be some hard medicine and hope the academy players are good enough to get promoted from the championship.

Very likely we'll be humped for 90 minutes

that's a bit no win though, if united win and go 15 points clear city will be motivated to close the gap and not lose the title by a mile. if they lose they'll want to win to close the gap to 9 points. city will be motivated regardless i reckon, we just need to go into it with no pressure and try and score a couple and hope that's enough for a point!

that points average btw will see us finish on 34 points. which will be either just enough or just short of staying up. hmmm. how sad.

pretty daming numbers really. very depressing. maybe i'm in denial then? because i still want to give lambert time and i still believe we will in the long term be better off with him than without him. it's massively frustrating watching us as we do show signs of playing infinitely better football than anything we saw under AM but the results just don't bear this out. i mean take the last league game. started off horrendous, i thought we would get panned massively. then all of a sudden we played calm controlling footy and made more chances than them at their place for half an hour. so i thought, hang on we might just be able to get a point. then we get level second half and i thought, noooo, we could win here. then they all shat themselves and defended the 18 yard line for 20 mins and once they scored it seemed inevitable. all in 90 minutes, if you're a pessimist you look at the result, the first 10 minutes and the last 20 minutes and you say "we're shit and are going down", an optimist looks at all the good stuff in the middle and thinks on our day we'll beat anyone! (well a deranged optimist might). i'm somewhere in the mniddle now and i have no idea what to think anymore. really but as i said there's something about the lambert and villa combination that i think will turn up the goods eventually...

loads of pressure on arsenal to perform, if they score early we're **** i would think, if we score early though who knows. if we get nothing and wigan win and there's 3 points to either newcastle or southampton then we can still catch one of them and we stay out of the bottom three...

oh dear. fat sam? even if we do go down i'd prefer lambert to continue than let that word removed anywhere near our club

what about bitter fan syndrome?

doesn't look bad, although the standard of the defending leaves a bit to be desired for a few of the goals. looks like he can play on the left or the right. we lack width from real wide players. we have albrighton or academy kids as wide players. might give us a plan be, or let us play a real 4-4-2, or 4-5-1.

no

i'm still not in the lambert out camp, the damage was done in the first leg in a lot of ways. however, the second half was hideous, after the goal from a set piece (AGAIN) we lacked any kind of shape. you could see at times the players had no **** clue what their roles should be on the pitch and that was lamberts fault. again, seems they prepared well on the training ground producing yet another good first half display, yet again we unravel after a goal against us from a set piece. this was happening before lambert, it happened under mcleish and it happened under houllier. this set piece thing is insane and the insanity is running into it's third season. this is a very big low for us out of something that at half time coudl have been a big plus had we taken even just one more of the chances we created in the first half. after they scored we were absolutely horrendous to watch, by the time weimann came on we had no formation to speak of at all. repeating myself a bit but that is lamberts fault and he's panicked as much as our playing staff there really. i started this off saying i'm not in the lambert out camp yet and i'm still not. paying off another manager, getting a new one in zero time and trusting him to spend some cash and saving us just doesn't look realistic to me .this shoudl convince PL, and that clearing in the woods faulkner that investment is needed. i still think long term PL can build something here and after tonight all the mistakes of the last few years have come home to roost. it's time to draw a line under it, but we can't fully do that till warnock, hutton, dunne, ireland and maybe a couple of others are off the payroll. it's going to be a long hard season from here but sacking PL isn't the answer to our problems. the MON/RL/Faulkner hangover isn't over yet so we're going to have to get used to the fact that this is going to be a long road out of the shit and keep the faith a bit.

cheers, shame that! 2 - 0 at 90 mins winning is a hell of a lot better than 2 - 0 going into extra time

they are 4/6 to get to the final and we are 11/10. makes for grim reading that, do away goals count at 90mins or only after extra time?

shame that, my first time at villa park we got spanked by newcastle in the old second division, i was still proud of the shirt though.

for sure, lots of people go a little over the top in berating people who have heard something from someone inside the game. i just think it's a shame that people might not be posting for fear of a few keyboard warriors venting their frustrations...

the bent transfer broke on here first if i remember right. i'm still hoping for a couple of new additions and it's just SO quiet here at the mo with regards to even a whiff of a rumour

ahah, that's the GT managing at old trafford matter sorted then! what about the ITK issue? mysteryman? is there anyone who might have an inside track on anything? i really miss the plane spotting too, shame all that OGS stuff did for that!

not for united he didn't! have the ITK's really all been scared off by people calling them BSers?

two words: Champions League.