Recircle

Somewhat. The win against Spurs was encouraging, but they rode their luck in the win against Leicester (only Van Domselaar and a scrambled goal-line clearance at one point prevented the draw), and drawing against adrift-at-the-bottom Bristol City doesn't inspire much confidence. This current season is becoming painful to endure.

I've only seen brief highlights, but looking at how Villa apparently set up, playing Corsie as the linchpin of a middle three facing a Liverpool array of two forwards supported by a line of five, including two of the best up-and-coming progressive midfielders in Höbinger and Nagano, seemed to be inviting trouble (I know needs must, and guess if sod's law hadn't ruled her out of the reckoning, Miri Taylor might've been tried in there). Blindkilde Brown is a significant loss and Villa ought to be looking to get a midfielder for next season who can develop the ball. Mentioning Nagano, the Japan internationals who've been popping up in the WSL are starting to make a real impression: Man City's Hasegawa is the clear pick and on another level, but Nagano as well as Hayashi and Shimizu for West Ham (the latter mostly works as a right wing back but also seems adept at playing more centrally) have stood out. They all seem to possess cool heads, good close control ability and have a good eye for seeing and playing a raking pass (see Hayashi's pass that led to the assist for West Ham's equaliser against Man Utd last Sunday). If I were part of Villa's scouting dept, I'd be looking at recordings of WE League games, as well as games from other leagues featuring Japan internationals; Villa are fairly stocked in physical presence department (Hanson, Parker, Maritz, Taylor), offsetting that with some vision and calm industry in the middle could be the way to go. (Last year's World Cup group stage match between Spain and Japan is worth another watch. Given the opposition, Japan probably turned in the best team performance of the competition.)

She's being given the opportunity to play alongside Alex Greenwood, Lauren Hemp, Chloe Kelly and Bunny Shaw; even if Villa had had a miracle run this season, there's no way she's not going to be seriously tempted.

This is the way I thought it might go; an odd point here and there. It's one thing to broadly contemplate a 'worst case scenario' when you draw a tough run of fixtures, to hypothetically write-off five games on the bounce, but to have that scenario turn into a reality: five played, five lost, sixteen goals conceded, margin of defeat getting bigger, that's quite a hole to have to climb out of. 0-6 is the sort of defeat that can lead to players pointing fingers in order to try and save face; disunity can break out.

Last season was fantastic despite one or two heavy-ish loses, but the idea this season was surely to close the gap against the top clubs somewhat. There's something next level horrible about losing 0-6. A team with the likes of Daly, Van Domselaar, Hanson and Pacheco in it shouldn't be suffering an abject hiding like that, even to Chelsea. Losing five games on the trot from season's start is really going to hobble confidence and momentum.

See, I didn't expect an absolute doing. I was thoroughly prepared for another loss, but a battling one, not a capitulation. It's worrying. Villa's season is already turning into a rescue job; wave goodbye to best-of-the-rest or better. The big concern is that some of the marquee names will be looking to bail out (you imagine Daly would like a tilt at the Champions League before she retires). Van Domselaar must be wondering what she's walked into - you can imagine her too re-assessing with an eye to exiting at the earliest opportunity via a release clause or what have you; the great reputation she's established for herself is rapidly becoming tarnished. With her you can almost sense the longer term story before it's been played out: that she moves on to do well elsewhere and comes to regard the move to Villa as a complete misstep.

I wonder how Patri Guijarro and the other players who refused to be members of the Spain squad have reacted to the win. They bottled up the conflicted feelings and offered their congratulations, I suppose.

That statement reads as though it were written by Rishi Sunak.

You look at the games up to the final and, barring the one against Nigeria, England controlled things well - a slow-ish but efficient start in the group but building momentum, handling the one shoot-out they had very efficiently, pulling back quick goals after Colombia and Australia had scored in the QF and SF games, Russo, Hemp, James and Toone sharing out the goals. The results up to the final make it hard to find fault with the system(s) Wiegman went with. I think England felt the proverbial weight of expectation in the final; despite all the work done on managing emotions and maintaining focus and whatnot they were nervous. Walsh looked rattled; Bronze was something of a bomb-scare; Hemp and Russo couldn't get on the same sharp wavelength. Daly had a bit of a curious tournament, but she has some good memories to look back on, and after the group opener got good game time. Had she not been taken off for the second half of the final, she'd have been pushed up or would've pushed herself up.

Edit: mean-spirited

Rather than Chelsea, who seem flush with goalies, I thought Arsenal might've shown an interest in Hampton. I know Zinsberger is an established international and a big character and all that, but she's always struck me as a bit of a weak link whenever I've seen Arsenal - you get the impression she's not quite prepared to put her body on the line as much as a committed, top-drawer keeper should be prepared to.

It would be interesting to know what was really driving Hampton's move: ambition to improve and raise her profile at a bigger quote unquote club, or pragmatism because she'd become aware that a mutual interest had developed between AVWFC and Daphne van Domselaar. Hampton's a really good and improving keeper, but from what I can tell Van Domselaar is everything Hampton is and more.

It's a Prem win celebration and you'd expect levity, but at the same time it's a public event and the players are still representatives of their club. Grealish alone seems to be carrying on as though he's off-duty and tucked out of the spotlight in some roped-off VIP club section, acting the giddy tաat. He isn't, and never quite will be again, one of the lads; the daft money he's being paid by City and his other 'business partners' are meant to come with some responsibilities. Looking at the way Guardiola and many of the others are acting at this City do, it seems as though they're having to force or fake 'letting it all hang out' because being a disciplined, self-aware pro is so ingrained in them; with Grealish in full lairy lad-mode it looks as though it's the other way around.

Showed good technique. Hit it first time with the ball running across him, with curl to take it away from the defender on the line (and with his weaker foot).

He probably feels as though a weight's been lifted, now that the return to Villa Park has been negotiated.

A seemingly on-the-level post until the second part of that last line, which unfortunately makes your citing of the tragic case of that young Birmingham supporter seem like a pretext under cover of which you aim yet another kick at Grealish ("millionaire"; "claims"; the inverted commas around 'one of us').

Grealish will be expecting a hostile reaction from some, and will thrive off it, since it will show that people still feel something. Hatred is often passion inverted; people seem never to jeer relatively less vital former players, while the reasons cited by the best who leave seem to be held to be especially heinous by those with an all-or-nothing turn of mind (all-and-nothing would be a more real world mindset, since it better reflects the contradictions and complexities of life. On the latter basis Jack can give his all for City as a professional while feeling all for Villa as a supporter. A bigger contradiction makes sense of this: football is simultaneously important and not important).

Except that the 'fire' in this case is a private life; there isn't a person alive who isn't tending one in that sense, so the metaphor pours water on itself (especially given that tabloid journos will put a match to potentially 'flammable materials' even if they don't already happen to be burning).

모든 빌라 팬은 Jack Grealish의 행복을 기원합니다.

He might end up thinking he left it later than he should've, but going to Manchester is still a branching-out for an apparent homebody like Grealish. I doubt he's going to spend the rest of his life there, working or otherwise, but for the moment it's a 'headquarters' that offers a lot. From there he gets to travel and practice his profession in more places than were available to him previously (when are Villa next likely to play a meaningful match in Paris or Bruges?). There can be no doubt he would've most wanted to do this 'further afield' stuff with Villa, but he was going to run out of career time trying but missing out, if he'd stayed.

There's bound to have been a number of Mancs among the thousand-and-one TEFL or backpack Brits clogging up Thailand in recent times, so maybe more similar than it once would've been.

The first line says more about you than it does about Manchester, and develops out of the same sort of sweepingly dismissive view that would drive some City fans to jump on stuff like this about Birmingham: https://forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk/threads/birminghams-a-sh-thole-official.291971/ (nice, apart-from-the-flock comment at #11: "All big cities in this country are s**tholes[.] I'm sure most Brummies are decent people. This thread could/should be a sub-topic of the "Distribution of Wealth' thread. I do agree that the way they talk is sonic agony though."). Like you, I've only visited Manchester once (bonus: Pearl Jam weren't playing there that day!), but can appreciate its cultural history. Were any of your moves from one country to another driven by the offer of better pay or more challenging work?

And try not to mock a whole city and its inhabitants in your come-back; the cosmopolitan well-travelled should be bigger than that.

And yet you repeatedly revile and mock Grealish for making the choice to move away from his home city in order to broaden his personal and professional horizons!

One of the great Villa games and results of recent times. But his goal in the draw at Old Trafford a couple of years ago will live as long in the memory, and the 7-2 win against Liverpool that he was instrumental in will have longer historical legs than either of those United games.