romavillan

i suppose losing by one goal away from home but knocking it around nicely means that united are doomed as well does it? from my time in the holte end i knew we were a seriously negative bunch of weirdos in the main, but starting a relegation thread 90 minutes in to a long season, coupled with the other bits and bobs of undue criticism levelled at our own team i've seen on here has been a bit of a surprise. i watched us in the old second division too, some of you lot would commit suicide i'm sure just at the mere though of it... anyway, chin up villans, i still reckon good things are going to come our way with PL in charge UTV

and swansea had a squad of world beaters when they completely humiliated us at home just after we'd beaten chelsea?

lots of twatter about medical being passed. any talk of price yet?

yeah i'd say it'll take a couple of seasons at least until he's had the time to build a squad that's his. the fact the knives are out for him ALREADY in other threads is just mental.

well said. also, mods can we use the world filter so that "tippy tappy" becomes "i am a penis"?

the longest journey begins with a single step. only got to see highlights so i'm not going to comment on the game per se. in answer to "how come lambert..." though, because he wants to turn us into a good football team. lets not get lots of sand in our vagina's about "tippy tappy" either, if you can't see that keeping the ball is what the best teams have done for the best part of 100 years then you need medical help.

this is fantastic news isn't it? agree completely that it looks like a PL appointment given his connections with hitzfeld. a great move too and one that shows some long termism if you ask me along with the hope of some intelligent rebuilding. great stuff all round!

Do not agree on Gabby. Looking at strike for Bordeaux and Villa, respectively, Gabby bangs one in every .248 matches, while Chamakh scored on an average of every .247 matches, making Gabby just slightly better. Even more so if you consider the PL a superior league to Ligue 1. But that is irrelevant, Chamakh is shite and we will not sign him. since when did gabby average 4 goals a game?

chamakh has great technique, needs someone to sort his head out for him though i think. how old is he anyway? i wouldn't write him off just yet. if we coudl get him he'd be great for us and fit right in with the presumed narrow PL style...

2 shady seasons? last year he did pretty well by all accounts, didn't he win the title and play in the CL quite a bit? shame this didn't work otu for us, £6m for a CL midfielder is pretty fair.

You and CI are some bellends I tell's ya. WTF ? Grow up Ignore it mate, the forum is full of kid's and their childish antics at the moment. ( o Y o ) don't know what you mean? p.s. bennett link is interesting, still nothing even vaguely concrete though ay?

CI has ALWAYS been funny. i think we can read into the las tfew pages on here that no-one knows anything at all about any transfer activity at the villa. right then, i'm gonna open a beer and start contemplating cooking some fish... just one thing before i go, what kind of person makes that sort of total BS up for attention? crazy days...

albrighton played some very good stuff for houllier, bannan has shown some class in patches but nowhere near as often as albrighton did. the fonz hasn't done either of those things yet. i don't think he is lazy, you hear all sorts about his attitude so i don't know what to beleive there. i've seen him a few times and his movement and his running with the ball look good, he looks like he has good technique and he's got a good goal scoring record at reserve level. i'd personally like to see delfouneso get some time on the pitch this year, bring him on for 15 mins here and there, plus hopefully the youngsters get a crack at the league cup.

i dunno, i think PL will set his stall out differently, playing compact and through the middle does not mean you play horizontal tippy tappy all the time. i think there'll be a big emphasis on playing a vertical (through) ball early if it's on and get at the opposition as much as possible.

i think it'll be good to see for a change! in other countries it's pretty normal for a lot of teams to play this way in order to stay more compact as a unit and so they can move the ball quicker more easily and keep it better. another nail in the coffin of the PL = MON argument too, MON was get it wide as fast as possible and try and get crosses in from behind. it'll alwasy be something we can switch back to because most of our players will have played that way a lot in their careers (and growing up).

won't be anywhere even remotely close to 54m and will be a massive improvement. figures for this year will be an improvement again, hopefully tied to the fact that we get 5m+ more in prize money from the league and loads more in ticket sales as a base. plus paying a shedload, a metric fuckton, less in wages.

the premier league are talking about their own version of the FFP rules now too. so the problem with throwing hundreds of millions of pounds into transfers and wages could well turn out to be not only you don't get to play in europe and increase your revenue that way, but you don't get to play in the prem either! for us to be big time again, we need 5 or 6 years of solid improvement on a sustainable model getting 100% out of all of our playing staff and finishing as high up the table as poss. hopefully that woudl see us have a coupel of runs out in europe too. more prize money from the prem, more bums on seats at VP, TV money from europe too, more merchandise sold.... then the hard part woudl be going from that base to the CL anyway, whining about randy not wanting to just chuck £50m at us every summer is a bit weak.

i dunno, i'm quietly lookign forward to see how albrighton, bannan, gardner etc. develop with PL in charge. hopefully he'll be able to get back to the form of a coupel fo seasons back... shame he's out, could become a big asset for us, might not, but could.

let's perhaps come back to this point in a couple of months when a PL team with ireland in has played a few games shall we?

ahah. those were the days...

it's deja-vu all over again

Le Tissier did suffer a total lack of ambition. I am actually pretty glad he did suffer it. Southampton built their team around him therefore he could showcase his talent to the maximum. Brilliant player. If he had gone to a bigger club that would not have happened. The sacrifice is he never won anything. But he is Xavi's boyhood idol. i'm not sure he'd see it as a total lack of ambition! he was the best english player of his generation IMO. as for bull, weren't inter in for him at one point? pretty sure there was a serie a offer. my memory isn't the best though!

as said elsewhere apparently coming to work with the youth set up. @mazrim: i'd think bodymoor heath is a lot safer yes.

Actually, I don't think many of us at VT would. We're fans. I know for a fact that if I was playing for Villa and earning 40k a week I wouldn't leave even Man City waved 100k in front of my face. Of course, most football players aren't fans of the club they play for so you can't expect that from them. If you're serious then clearly it's easy to say such things when you know it's never gonna happen. There is no person in the world that would turn down 60K pay rise and the chance to win things at the highest level. Unless they completely lacked ambition of course. steve bull, le tissier...

i think KEA may well be the closest you are going to get to this hard case destroyer in fron of the back 4 that some of you are crying out for. i don't think PL's game calls for one either. i think he will organise us to get the ball back with good pressing and movement without the ball. certainly a lot of the quotes from the players have been talking about good running on the ball and off the ball in both phases. i could well be wrong and he's looking for a way to push KEA up the field but i doubt it, i think KEA will line up with bannan/herd/gardner/makoun as the two most withdrawn CMs and there will be ireland, zog/holman or zog and holman in front of them.