Intercourse_The_Penguin

Well isn't all this just a kick in the teeth. I have a lot of faith in PL, but really I don't care who the scout or buying manager is, finds like Benteke are one in... well, a fairly large number. Sure, I guess we can all think of a long list of players who've been picked up fairly cheaply and gone on to great things, but no one manager or scouting team has a better strike rate than one in... yeah, okay a fairly large number again (I haven't really worked this out). For every Viera there're several Chamakhs or Baptistas or Arshavins or... Well, this is a bloody stinking pig of a piece of news basicallly. If I hadn't had beers in the fridge on reading it I'd be in danger of waking the wife with a HULK SMASH rage (a 5' 8" rather unfit hulk with dodgy hand ligaments, but a hulk nonetheless).

Yeah, this is a bit harder than twitter feeds! But I'd hazard something like "English Premier League: Aston Villa are submitting an unprecedented £8.5m transfer offer (approx... a shitload of yen), but, looking forward to next season [Kiyotake?], said [not sure what to make of the ni todometa here... perhaps "said dismissively" or "said taking no notice"... or perhaps "said to put an end to"... I dunno, a bit uncertain on that] 'I will rest and then look forward to doing my best in the new season' Best I can do. Kind of stretching myself here. Good practice, though Edit: £8.5m, obviously, not £8.5... although that would be unprecedented too, for a top player...

Well, the tweet above the one referred to just now is from Kagawa and says: 今日はわざわざ来てくれてありがとう！また一緒のベッドで寝ような！笑 Which means "Hi, thanks for coming especially [i.e. especially for this purpose]! Lets sleep in the same bed again! Lol" So, yeah, could be good friends I guess And Kiyotake has since tweeted several times with details of his visit to a school in Fukushima, so it looks most likely that was "the place" he had arrived at! Intercourse_The_Penguin, are you Japanese? Nah, just been trying to learn the language for several years now. Tbh, I'm only really at intermediate level and my reading is not too hot (since learning the hundreds and hundreds of Kanji you need for full literacy is a ballache), but twitter feeds are generally nice and easy to make sense of since they're short and rarely involve complex grammatical constructions.

Well, the tweet above the one referred to just now is from Kagawa and says: 今日はわざわざ来てくれてありがとう！また一緒のベッドで寝ような！笑 Which means "Hi, thanks for coming especially [i.e. especially for this purpose]! Lets sleep in the same bed again! Lol" So, yeah, could be good friends I guess And Kiyotake has since tweeted several times with details of his visit to a school in Fukushima, so it looks most likely that was "the place" he had arrived at!

Apparently a "certain place" is Japan as he is doing a charity event there with Honda & Kagawa* * Can't remember how to spell his name! Fair play, don't know why he wouldn't just say "I'm at such a place" Bit silly really... Well, ところ does translate as "place", but it's actually often used in a figurative sense, so you could use it to mean a point in a story, for instance, or a particular situation or state of affairs (as in のぞむところ - nozomu tokoro, meaning literally "desired place", but actually meaning something more like how the speaker want things to be, rather like us saying "I'm in a bad place right now"). What I would take this to mean is more Now we've come to a certain situation. Details to follow. Edit: well, that's one way to read it. It could, of course just literally be meaning a place as well. It could kind of fit both contexts, I think. I think I want to read a positive transfer spin into it!

Sorry, but i can not see PL signing Kevin Keegan. Could be the defensive coach some have said we're crying out for.

When you talk about players that always, always score against us (or used to), first name that comes to my mind is Matt Le Tissier. Even remember one game at VP in... oh, I dunno, early to mid 90s, saying to a mate when we were leading in the 90th minute "well, it can't be over yet, Le Tissier hasn't scored"... sho'nuff, he duly smacked in the equaliser for them... (though equally memorable and much sweeter was the season after... or possibly the one after that... when he knocked in a quick free kick whilst our defence was dithering and the ref chalked it off for no very good reason...)

To be a top 4 side you need to be pretty dominant on the pitch. It is that dominance that usually translates into comfortable and successive victories against the likes of Norwich, Fulham, West Ham, Sunderland, West Brom, etc. Scrappy teams like Villa tend to lose as many points as they gain. Well .. If we lose points as we gain then we will gain 57 .. Not very far from a top 4 spot .. lol Anyway I'll not say anything until we know if Benteke is certainly staying .. Then who will we get .. Tbh with our current squad .. I think we could do a top 10 and possibly top 8 .. If somehow we got Belhanda and Okore and a LB let's say Cresswell .. I will not write us out from the top 6 race .. And maybe more than that too .. Wow. They must have some bloody great shisha out there in Saudi Arabia That's really unfair. I mean, I know no-one wants to jinx it, and that's why we're being all circumspect and humble, but heck, right... I'm gonna go ahead and just say what everyone else is obviously thinking: if we get this guy I think we'll put together a surprise title challenge next season. (puff. puff) Whoah... my hands are huge. They can touch anything but themselves.... oh wait...

Quite. What of our proud history of last-minute transfers and debates about who is and is not a panic buy? Shocking disrespect for our most scared traditions by Lambert. Lambert out!

Also, two superb penos in opposite corners. And another thing I noticed were the goals from tight angles, two beating the keeper at near post, one at the far post. All just perfectly slotted into the small angle the keeper didn't have covered. Top stuff. At the Chelski game I thought he'd run out of space and run himself into too tight an angle before he slotted it in, but at the time I forgot he'd done a similar thing a couple of times before this season.

Very pleased I managed to get tickets for my and my six-year-old (in my usual disorganised, last-minute kind of way). His first ever game down Villa Park. On the online booking system, we got the last two seats together that I could find in the whole ground. Quite unreasonably excited. The lad is dying to get to sing the Benteke song, so hoping he scores!

Swansea: past instances in which I have professed to hate you were fraudulent.

Finally I can start wasting my time reading the transfer speculation thread rather than this one...

Message to my heart: it's over, you can slow down now...

Yeeeeaaaah!

Keep the bloody ball, Jacks!

YESSS!

Man. I can't keep up. I'm just embarrassing myself. Need quicker brain and fingers... Maybe I should just watch The Apprentice with the wife...

What?? Was a bit late with the comment. Had given up and only picked it up from the BBC feed Fair do's, thought you were after a Wigan win for a moment. Christ no! Feeling almost as nervous as for our last few games here. Always had a slight dislike of Swansea since having a good Cardiff supporting mate a few years back. We'd watch MOTD/Final Score and I'd join in his cheering when the Jacks lost. Feeling that dislike intensified a hundredfold tonight...

What?? Was a bit late with the comment. Had given up and only picked it up from the BBC feed

Oh for the love of...

Yes! You'd better not be giving me false hope here, Jacks!

Can't stop myself running permutations through the BBC predictor. So many results for other teams that are close calls between now and next Sunday. On the plus side, I think we need to remember that we only really need ONE of Wigan-Swansea, Norwich-Boggies and QPR-Barcodes to end in a draw or worse for the teams around us and we can go into the final day with the minimum of concern (even though perhaps not being mathematically safe). (Or if Sland only manage two draws or worse this week that would also relieve the pressure on us considerably, but I can't imagine they won't win at least one of their games this week.) I'm not sure how I could cope with it going to the last day. I could barely eat lunch at the barbie I was at yesterday due to nerves, and thought I might actually be physically sick when Narrrch got the equaliser.

McGrath - no reasons needed The second question is whether or not I could bring myself to have Platt back - he's often been a prize prick since leaving us and the manner of his departure hardly endears him to the Villa heart... but on the other hand, oh for his goals from midfield, those seemingly impossible to mark runs into the box, his movement from set pieces... all things our current team badly lacks So... either Platt or... hmmm since I've set my sights on a goal-scoring midfielder... perhaps Merson. Such an exciting and entertaining player to watch. And the third: Shaw - the thought of him and Tekkers together up front is just too awesome to pass up

Simultaneously feeling: "Okay! Bring it onnn!" AND "oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, this is too nerve-wracking" Not sure how this is possible, but there you go...