mole86

51 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I'd put question marks over the futures of both of the openers and Bairstow.

England haven't found a top three that work.

 

Surely the massive caveat to that is ‘on the sub continent’. Sibley and Burns are surely cemented for the home tests, Bairstow is only involved because of this rotational policy anyway.
 

I’m not convinced about Crawley but I would hope and expect Sibley, Burns and Crawley to be the top 3 against NZ in June

Elmo is killing us going forward

36 minutes ago, Tomaszk said:

They'll be paying through the bumhole for most of them which is nice.

Konsa does worry me a tiny bit. Two years left in the summer. Big agent (same as Grealish) who could be eyeing up a juicy admin fee on a big transfer during a quiet window.

It only worries me as I'm certain we'll have been waving one under his nose for about three or four months. Plenty of time of course, hopefully it'll get done. Selling a £12m defender for £60m might interest the club if they think Konsa won't be signing another one and they see the size of the fee going down the longer we wait.

Agree with this, I’d hate to lose Konsa but our model now is likely to include one sale a summer. As long as it’s not Grealish I’d be relatively relaxed about selling anyone if we get a silly offer.

None of them covered themselves in glory but I thought McGinn was the best of the three on Wednesday so not surprised Luiz has been dropped/rested. I think his levels have dropped off the most of everyone that was playing regularly pre Covid outbreak so hopefully it will do him some good

39 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

Thanks. I've listened to two podcasts and Dan Bardell keeps saying he's out the next game.

I think the BT Sport graphic confused people when he got booked. It had his shirt number on it which is of course 5

7 hours ago, Laughable Chimp said:

Yes, and most of them were comfortable saves for the keeper.

2 goals, 2 good saves, 2 off target and 2 comfortable saves/tame shots isn’t a bad nights work, even allowing for the fact one of his goals was a penalty 

8 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Shoulda changed straight away when 2-0 up, if only for fresh legs, players gonna suffer later on in the season.

Any positives to take from tonight in your eyes? 

9 hours ago, TRO said:

I didn't think we had that in us......so pleased to be proved wrong.

Leicester game really wasn’t that long ago

1 hour ago, MotoMkali said:

But defensively he still looks very suspect to me. Like when he got booked there was no reason for him to let the ball bounce and run. He was being pressured by a very good player and he let him waltz past.  

Didn't he do the opposite of that?

2 hours ago, Rolta said:

But as most football news is bs, you're not working with very solid information. You're drawing conclusions, but you don't really know.

That’s all any of us can do isn’t it? I know some people think they’ve received some top secret inside information on the Rashica ‘deal’ but it’s unlikely anything official will leak directly from the club meaning all we can do is speculate from the same uninformed position.

The only cast iron fact is that he is not an Aston Villa player, even the comments from Baumann could be construed as us being used to drum up interest from Leverkusen given what actually transpired on deadline day..

2 minutes ago, Dave-R said:

This is annoying to the point this wasted energy could of been better spent elsewhere to find other players lol.

What does this even mean? 

48 minutes ago, Folski said:

Has Rigo been kidnapped or what?

Three ball at The Belfry with Rashica and Leao

31 minutes ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

True but we bought Jota to play in the Premier League. 

I’m not so sure about that to be honest, the deal was clearly set up before we knew where we would be playing in my opinion. We then still went through with it as he was going to be a more useful squad member than Gardner and a relatively inexpensive addition, particularly given how much business we then knew we had to do following promotion.

5 minutes ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

But on a serious note that’s a strange one.  Whilst he is no way near good enough you don’t often see contracts terminated. 
.

We did the same with Bjarnason last summer

8 minutes ago, M_Afro said:

I agree with much of this but he does not try anywhere near hard enough to stop crosses coming in. Compare that to Cash. I really feel that it’s partly to do with not having the energy to do it because of poor conditioning. He needs to close down more quickly and aggressively 

Completely agree with this, it’s clearly been a tactic since lockdown to have a narrower back four. Part of that is accepting more balls will come into the box but it really needs the full backs to get out to the winger quickly and Targett just looks like he’s not got the energy to do it.

The only caveat, which has been mentioned, is that he also doesn’t get anywhere near the same amount of assistance from Grealish as Cash will from the winger the other side. Not a criticism of Grealish, it seems to be how we set up.

3 minutes ago, rayk said:

Not sure what the situation is with Declan Rice, but if he goes to Chelsea I can see RLC going to the Spammers.

I think it would be Rudiger they take on loan in that deal

Just now, The Fun Factory said:

Lansbury, Nakamba, Ramsey. Interesting.

More or less interesting than it was at Burton?

56 minutes ago, KenjiOgiwara said:

Personally I would get a strong striker on early. I'd increase the tempo a lot. Playing wide is fine, but pinging crosses into the box isn't the way to go when they are clearly better in the air. You need to up the tempo and be patient. Get them tired. 

Letting them getting breaks by clearing or taking down crosses just gives them the advantage of pushing their team out, catching breaks, running down time, reorganising and so much more. 

I'm baffled anyone can be happy with how we perform against 10 men. My mate tends to be rather objective about Villa with no interests one way or another and he said we looked 'clueless with advantage'. Sums it up. We don't look drilled in how to handle an advantage at all. 

I don't disagree that bringing Davis on earlier was an option, however it could also have left us prone to a counter attack not unlike the one which led to the penalty as we'd have been a man light in midfield. The decision not to make that change earlier than 60 minutes definitely can't be called "amateuresque", particularly when we won the game. Surely bringing on a 'strong striker' might have just encouraged us to play more long ball than we actually did....

I think the patience was fine, would have liked us to be a bit sharper on the ball but that's more down to fitness than tactics at this stage of the season. I also don't think anyone will be overcome with joy at the overall performance, however these are exactly the sort of games we wouldn't have won last year so I can't view your criticism as anything other than hyperbole

9 minutes ago, KenjiOgiwara said:

Not really the point. We should have scored several more with a more fitting tactic. 

There's a reason why we are always shite against 10 men. 

What is the more fitting tactic when your opponent has eight men in the box? It’s either going to be a moment of magic or incessant pressure from balls into the box that makes the difference.

I would concede we didn’t move it quick enough at times and personally I would have preferred the full backs to push higher and wider when we switched the ball but I also heard Smith shouting instructions to that effect.

The reason why we aren’t better against ten men is because we don’t have enough good players, not because they are being coached inadequately.

25 minutes ago, KenjiOgiwara said:

 

It's perfectly fine we utilized the space out wide, but there's a distinction between that and pinging crosses for an entire match against a 3 man backline and a single striker. 

 

You keep repeating '3 man backline', they changed to 4-4-1 when they made the sub at the half an hour mark

6 minutes ago, RicRic said:

Not at all your not getting old and that is close to the top player bracket Bruno Fernandes was not that far off its an insane amount of money and its a concern because it reduces our spending capacity in other areas thats why im more annoyed.

Bruno Fernandes cost £47m with a further potential £20m in add ons, plus 10% of any resale fee. Quite far off from the reported £28m potentially rising to £33m we are buying Watkins for

5 minutes ago, VillaFaninLondon said:

I just feel, if we've got £100m to spend (or even if we only have half or 3/4 that which shouldn't be the case because they told us it was £100m), that we should be looking to spend the money on 3-4 really quality additions rather than 6-7 meh additions and inflate the squad again. As you say there is a chance he could do well but if he doesn't we could lose half of what we spent on him. I also don't think RB is that big of a deal to blow any of our budget on, I wouldn't say no to a RB but I'd rather we looked at someone like Clyne on a free rather than a Championship RB who will cost us money and is less likely to be successful (the only issue with Clyne is fitness, but Mings had the same issues and has done ok with us). Or if we insist on spending money on a RB go for someone proven on the continent who can take us forward like Atal or Dumfries (both of whom would probably cost similar or maybe slightly more than Cash). Or just stump up a bit more and get Aarons who is clearly going to go far. 

 

We were told quite clearly we didn't want to get caught up in another relegation battle next season, this type of signing says to me they can't attract the quality they want. Imo they used the Trippier interest as a smokescreen to pretend to fans they're ambitious when it was obvious we weren't going to get him, and it makes mugs of us because if they really want a RB there are quality ones out there who would possibly come like the ones mentioned above but they aren't moving seriously for them.

 

I am also worried for Jack, players like Rashica are on a similar level to him and can help take the pressure off. If we end up with the players it looks like we're going to end up with I can see us being a predominantly one-man team again and Jack getting frustrated and wanting to leave. Other quality players like Luiz and McGinn could too.

 

I'm not expecting us to sign superstars overnight but a year on after staying in the Prem and I was actually more excited by our signings last summer when we were newly promoted, even if quite a few of them turned out to be rubbish.

 

All we need are 3, maybe 4 carefully thought out quality additions to take us forward. Dean himself said £10/12m is nothing to spend on players these days, yet his first signing of the summer looks like being another player in that ballpark figure when we should be going for a player in the bracket above that. It just doesn't make sense.

Who told us we had £100m to spend? 

The Brentford fans are a welcome addition to the forum in my eyes but definitely not ITK, they were as surprised as we were when we signed Konsa last summer

9 hours ago, GarethRDR said:

 

That issue of Shoot magazine with the **** front page April's Fool article about David Platt coming back that even had that arsehole doing a faux photoshoot and everything.

I'd completely forgotten about that!