Daweii

I am sure when Xia came in he thought it was stupid that the club stopped running on weekends aside from the obligatory football match.

It likely would. You have to remember that we have a new manager and world class coaching staff now. A lot of those players in that line up were above average for us on occasion last season they were just brought down by the rest. We'll be fine with that squad if managed correctly.. Our main issue now is adding a bit of squad depth so we don't have to rely on Lescott, Richards, Gabby on the bench each game.

HE SURVIVED!!!! The only casualty was Micah Richards who limped off on like 17 minutes, but no major loss there.

@srsmithusa Unless you are in a rush wait it out to see what shirt number he gets.

There was no video feed or anything. All my info comes from AVFCOfficial on Twitter who were covering key moments as the match went on. That was the only key moment for both Gabby and Sinclair.

Nope. He had a shot at close range parried after Sinclair totally messed up a shot, but no goals for Gabby.

It's all goals and it's all confidence building. Doesn't matter if it's against Chelsea or some Sunday League team scoring goals always feels good.

We didn't concede! Suck it Crystal Palace.. You may have scored 13 against this lot but you managed to concede.. Just how crap are you?!? Well done Villa I know it's just a run about but take this confidence with you.

8-0, Gestede, 86 mins

Had a shot parried so it was on target at least, progress..

Haven't conceded yet.. So that's a one up on Crystal Palace

Scoring goals and playing well even against shit is a confidence booster. Also it allows RDM to see how his squad moves on the pitch in a match scenario. So yeah it maybe is pointless from a challenge standpoint but that's not what pre-season is for.

At this rate even Gabby may get a rare goal in the second half..

Richards limps off injured.. Shame he looks like a top prospect for the future..

Not seeing where the goal is on that Gollini pic it looks like he's gone for a bit of a run down field with the ball.

0-3 now. Kozak, 19 mins.

His errors leading to a goal stat was 0.04 last season. De Gea was 0.03.. That said Guzan was 0.07 so not fully knowing how the scale works it's hard to know just how much worse a 0.07 is compared to 0.04. Either way it seems he doesn't make many mistakes

His goals conceded is 1.71 per 90 mins slightly lower than Guzan at 2.07. That said a lot of this stat is dictated by the defence you have in front of you. De Gea only concedes 0.97 but he's also in one of the worlds best teams with a defence worth close to £100 million in front of him. So for 21 years old Gollini is off to a pretty decent start, I would love to have seen De Gea's stats when he was 21.

There are a lot of variables that are to play last season.. I mean you may not believe it when I say it but our players when taken as individuals are good enough for the Premier League. Mismanagement and absurdly low confidence is what killed us off in the end. Tim Sherwood did a terrible job in pre-season. I don't know if training in pre-season was just sit down and play FIFA 16 or what, but our fitness levels and cohesiveness as a team was not there. When you consider that our starting eleven was basically completely new, not having a good pre-season was absurd and set us on the track we find ourselves now. We were on a huge losing streak thanks to good ol' Sherwood and confidence was so low it likely couldn't get any lower. At this point we needed a top quality man manager like Martin O'Neill to build them back up, but instead we made the next huge mistake of our season hiring the spineless Remi Garde. Aston Villa was a side summed up as a team weaker than the sum of its parts. You give these players playing with confidence to a good manager with a good pre-season under their belt and they will likely perform well. Lescott isn't a great player but he's also not as bad as last season made out, none of the players we have are bad players but a perfect storm of poor form, low confidence and mismanagement was enough to sink us. So yes RDM could just watch us last season and sell the whole squad, but he's likely smarter than that and realises there is quality in this squad if he can boost their confidence.

Just to remind everyone that this statement was taken from his personal Weibo account. He wasn't approached by Birmingham Mail they just took his posts. So anyone getting annoyed by this needs to get used to it as he's a social media savvy guy, he's not going to stop using his Weibo just because he now owns us and I don't expect him to.

Gollini is at the right club if he wants to be one of the very best, there are very few goalkeeping coaches better than Massimo Battara. So yes Xia is being our adorable lil' hype man right now, but in a few years his statements may be a lot closer to the truth. It's Gollini's future to waste with Battara coaching him.

It will likely be announced tomorrow. It's likely all gone through but like Gollini the club seem to be down with the idea of doing the photos with the shirt at the training camp in Austria. So if everything went to plan then an announcement maybe tomorrow.

I will start quickly with my thoughts on Valve as I actually don't care much about their side in all of this. Valve are guilty solely of not governing their API better. Valve need to make applying for access to the API to be an actual procedure complete with what a website wants to use the API for. If Valve had done this then CSGO skins would have stayed within Steam as a purely platform exclusive ecosystem. Yet they didn't govern their API allowing 're-sellers', 'gambling' and 'external skin' sellers to have a "link your account" feature on their site. The API was created for sites like howlongtobeat.com where you link your Steam account to see just how many games you have in your backlog. Yes it will eventually be down to a governing agency to decide if the crates system is gambling, but for now my main issue is that Valve didn't police their API or their platform well enough allowing for a grey market to materialise. Now onto what I consider to be the main issue here as it pisses me off when YouTubers use their power and popularity for nefarious means. Syndicate is not new to "controversy" he has been caught out by the Federal Trades Commission on two occasions prior to this one. The first was in 2014 where he was paid $30,000 for two videos endorsing the Xbox One. This actually isn't illegal but it is if like Syndicate you don't disclose to your viewers that it is a bought and paid for endorsement of the brand, this was the first case of Syndicate abusing his position for financial gain. The second came in 2015 with a game called 'Dead Realm'. Syndicate made dozens of videos about this game showing himself having lots and lots of fun playing it, the issue is he worked on and had financial ties linked with the games financial success. Did he disclose this to his viewers? No so they all bought it thinking it was a game he had found that looked damn cool. Now we are here with the 'CSGO Lotto' fiasco. My thoughts are simple; They (Syndicate and TmarTn) deceived their audience claiming that CSGO Lotto was a site they had found. They advertised said website to their audience comprised of viewers as young as 8 or 9 years old lured into gambling on the site. Showed higher than average win percentages in videos (YouTube) and on stream (Twitch.tv) Gambled on their own gambling site which is hugely illegal in its own right. This situation is a legal goldmine. There must be so many attorneys in the US right now licking their lips in anticipation of what is such a clear cut legal case. TmarTn and Syndicate may have broken dozens of gambling laws as the US is tough on gambling with it being illegal in many states. They may have broken countless laws by promoting gambling to viewers that are far too young to gamble. They have certainly broken laws when it comes to not disclosing any ties to CSGO Lotto in these videos, and lastly they have broken the law by gambling on their own gambling site. If this goes unpunished I will be shocked as there are far too many things they have done wrong here, not to mention as I said earlier this is now the third time Syndicate has deceived for financial gain. There are lots of things wrong with the gaming industry but for all my hate of microtransactions in full price games and shady DLC practices, this kind of thing makes all that seem like a small issue that can be tackled on another day. This whole CSGO fiasco from Valves neglect to YouTubers exploiting their power, this is something that has to stop.

Steer apparently impressed last season on loan so likely Gollini as number one, Steer as number two and if Bunn wants to stick around to be our number three then so be it.

I know lots of us myself included want several players gone, but leaving my bias to one side for a moment if RDM can get these guys working as a unit then we have one hell of a squad for the Championship. Add in players like Elphick, Tshibola, Gollini and a striker or two we have a pretty decent team. Yes it does require RDM weaving his magic at bringing harmony to a squad run by big egos, but if he can manage it then we have some pretty decent Premier League calibre players in our squad which will help a lot.