Panto_Villan

Could not agree more. this isn't a pop at moyes who I rate highly, but I do get the sence jose smells blood. I very much doubt a bid would ever have been placed had fergie still been in charge. Jose would have got a face full of glass next time he'd turned up with "a nice bottle of wine" after a match if he'd tried that. But yeah, I must say I'm surprised Chelsea are going in so hard for Rooney. They'd be mad to give United Mata, I think Mata is absolutely fantastic. Think how many assists he'd get with Van Persie up front! I do have a lot of time for Mourinho though. Yeah, he's patronising and arrogant as anything, but he's great entertainment and the league is much better having him than a boring fat man like Benitez. The comments he made about Lambert were a bit disrespectful, but I think Lambert is old enough and big enough to be able to deal with it. It's all good experience for him.

And even if that happens I think Baker or Clark is preferred at LB atm. I'd have thought Bennett would be straight back in if Luna is unavailable. He might do better knowing he really has to play out of his skin to stay in the team too.

You have to earn respect. You don't win one game and come close to winning another and suddenly have the football press fall in love with you. Tottenham qualified for the CL a few years back but still haven't really "made it" in the same way that the really big boys have. We won't be given credit as a genuinely good side until we've finished in or around the European spots for a couple of seasons. We can all feel something great is happening at Villa Park though, even if not many people outside the fans have noticed yet. I imagine this is how it feels to be a hipster.

I just hope he stays injury-free for at least another couple of years. I couldn't imagine how awful it'd be for him if he copped another season-ending injury after he's finally got back to the form that made us buy him in the first place.

Why? He was already on a long contract with no release clause. This is the same except he's almost certainly had a major pay rise too.

How was his performance yesterday? I saw a lot of people talking about Delph being amazing but not a lot of chat about KEA, and I didn't see much of the game myself. I've always kinda viewed Sylla as the ball-wining midfielder out of the two of them, with KEA being a bit more creative in attack, but people have been talking a lot about KEA's ability to intercept and dispossess the other team. Did he demonstrate that against Chelsea?

I'd say he's playing pretty well. His overall play hasn't been great yet. Probably something to do with the opposition. He has still managed to score 3 goals though, which is great. What Oaks is saying is imagine when the rest of his game clicks into place too (probably against poorer opposition, starting on Saturday). That's when I think the likes of Gabby and Andi will start to get in on the act too as CB's other parts of his game will bring the rest into play. I had forgotten two of his goals were penalties actually, so I probably overstated my case there and was looking at the ends rather than the means. However part of my point was that the fact you'd be able to see more evidence of him playing well against a lower-quality side doesn't necessarily mean that he's not playing well at the moment, it could just mean he's being stifled better by excellent defenders.

I'd say he's playing pretty well.

We deserved to lose and the ref got all the calls right. /crying

I went on the Sunderland boards to see what their thoughts were on the relegation battle towards the end of last season. Most of the posters seemed to be barely literate and communicating mostly in swear words. I hope they get relegated. Di Canio is going to be a total disaster, anyway. If you treat people the way he treats them, it just becomes a question of time until you've alienated literally everybody whose support you rely on to stay in the role.

I think he's also on a bit of a charm offensive at the moment. He had a hard time at Madrid and I think he just wants some love.

I love reading your posts for the way random words find their way in there in the oddest context. You on a phone with auto-correct?

£26m is that expenditure on fees or wages ? - Thought our wage bill was closer to £50m ? What I don't understand is why the likes of Norwich, Southampton, Cardiff , Swansea seem to have more available funds than villa. Perhaps because they weren't financially mismanaged by their owner in the first few years of ownership! Or perhaps that's exactly what they're doing now.

Lambert just seems to get it. I don't really know what it is, but whatever it is...he gets it.

Even logical old me would be filled to my eyeballs with undying hatred for Randy Lerner if we got relegated.

Test? <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qWP-z4O8Ddo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Test fail.

I think MON had a similar tactic, except without the ability to train the player or get them at good prices. Imagine the beast he'd have created if he'd taught Heskey how to kick a ball towards a net. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWP-z4O8Ddo

I think there's also a possibility that Lambert is a stubborn idealist who refuses to pay out cash for players he thinks are over-valued or thinks we do not need. The lack of January spending may be indicative of Lerner slamming on the financial brakes, but it could also be down to Lambert having faith in the players we already had or only seeing Sylla as value in that window. Or thinking that the time taken a January signing to settle in would be too long to be worth spending money on, given the position of the team at the time. It's very difficult to tell at this point what the actual reasons are, but Lambert seems the type to insist on doing things exactly his way irrespective of what anyone else thinks. Lerner may also be more willing to spend more money when Lambert has fully earned his trust, as it were. Again, it's just speculation, but it's impossible to definitively conclude that RL has no ambition for AVFC any more based on what evidence we have.

Again, I'm not trying to single you out here, as I appreciate you've actually provided some reasons in response, but your first two sentences contradict one another. If the most important thing is how well the team are doing on the pitch, then surely the overspending under MON should be cancelled out? As a genuine question, would you rather that Lerner hadn't given MON that level of money and did more of a Kenwright at Everton style financial straightjacket job? That would come with its own set of risks; relying very heavily on the skills of the manager. Much of the criticism seems to cut both ways - we were challenging for the CL at one point that counts against Randy because he overspent, then we did badly subsequently and it's Randy's fault because he didn't spend enough (I'll admit here that individual posters aren't always stating both of these views at the same time). I don't disagree that he made a bad choice with McLeish but I think Houllier could have turned out well had he not had his health issues - so I'd say there he made one terrible decision and one mediocre one. The point Risso makes is an interesting one - personally, I think people are generally happy with it at the time but much less happy when the crows come home to roost and you have to deal with the financial fallout. I guess it's just human nature, the same reason why people spend their overdrafts.

Of course he can win. But it's going to take time and its going to take more than just a win the first game of the season. We've had a truly awful few years in a row which has mainly been down to the decision making of the owner. Forgive me if I'm not out chanting his name because he finally started to do a few things right. If Ireland had to play our next game and did ok, made a few good passes would you seriously expect people who have completely slagged him off, and rightly so, to do a complete 180 degree turn? Or do you think they'd wait for him to do it a few more times before they completely changed their opinion of them? There's still no proof that Lerner wants this team to be anything other than one that survives with a wage bill that's cheap. I don't know about others but even though I don't like Lerner I not someone who will never change my mind about him. I've given him credit and praise for how we've gone about our summer business and for the way we handled the Benteke transfer request. If we continue to do these things I will continue to praise him. Personally I think it would be ridiculous for people who don't rate him to completely change their mind because of one game. You've obviously changed your mind on Lambert so I wasn't singling you out as someone who will always persecute him whatever he did, I was just using your post as an example. However, my previous longer post did point out a number of things that I think he has done well that people appear to give him little or no credit for - for example, the £30m redevelopment of Bodymoor Heath that the club is still reaping the rewards from, the way the club does business, or the way he stumps up tens of millions every year to cover the loss. I was sorta of hoping you'd reply to that post rather than the throwaway one a few posts lower. Which specific decisions are you referring to, though? Alex McLeish was a huge mistake, but he was only one mistake. I think it's a fallacy that he's not backed the club financially, and I think the fact the wages got unsustainable was because he actually backed the manager too much (the thing people are criticising him for not doing). I may have missed some other things, but I don't think he's actually made that many bad decisions. I think the Bannan thread is beyond any of us

Smetrov is an example of a poster who is continually stating the opinion that the club will never achieve more than mid-table mediocrity until Lerner starts spending more. Your above post is blaming Lerner for backing the manager too much. He can't win. It's also noticeable that this thread has had about two positive posts in it after the Arsenal victory, whereas the Lambert thread has had about 200. I can see why Lambert is more directly responsible, of course, but it does illustrate what Mantis is talking about.

People moaning that we've not spent enough money are assuming that Lambert actually wants to spend lots of cash (have you guys ever met a Scotsman before?). Lerner has done plenty of good things for the club. Never been shy with transfer fees - £18m on Bent for example. He's backed every new manager with money, and we've had quite a few of them recently. When we sell a player, we get a damn good price for him: Milner, Barry, Young, Downing. He didn't cash in on Benteke this summer when the sharks were circling. The club has a good reputation for the professionality of its dealings in the transfer window. Aalborg even cited it as a factor why they refused a slightly higher offer for Helenius when we were negotiating with them. He's put money into redeveloping the stadium (the pub) and the training ground at Bodymoor, as a result we now have excellent facilities that a lot of the younger players cite when they're interviewed on why they joined. That cost some £30m. We finished 6th three years in a row under MON. He's hired Lambert and stuck with him when times were bad. Most people's criticism of him seems to boil down to three things: He hired McLeish. I won't defend him here at all, because it was a shocking decision and nearly got us relegated as well as destroying a lot of fans faith in the club. Massive error, no question. He's not investing enough in the club. I don't agree with this, because he's spent a lot of transfers already (as mentioned above) and the club is losing something like £50m a year already. That's about £150,000 a day that's going down the toilet...and people are calling him a tightarse? The fact he's not willing to spend the GDP of a small country to get us into the Champions League is hardly a reason to hate the man. If an anonymous benefactor donated £50m to the club he'd be hailed as a hero but Lerner is investing that every year and people seem to hate him because he's allegedly not spending enough. He owns the club, so ultimately he's responsible for the huge loss the club makes every year. Partially true, maybe, but ultimately this is only the case because he's backed the managers (like MON) who put people on ludicrous salaries. But if he hadn't backed the mangers with enough cash, people would hate him for that too - see point 2). Do I think Randy Lerner is the best club owner ever? No. Would I rather have him than Mike Ashley? Yes. Dave Whelan? Yes. Bill Kenwright? Yes, I would. At the rate of current loss, AVFC would financially destroy Lerner in 12 years. The fact he wants to reduce the wage bill a bit is not a reason to crucify him. Have some perspective, please...the man has spent more money on AVFC than the entire of VillaTalk ever will.

I do think that even if we get smashed by Chelsea and the couple of games after, most people will be able to think back to last Christmas and know that the team know how to get out of an apparent death spiral and back to winning. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

I predict he'll make a bunch of defensive howlers during the season but we'll love him anyway.

I think it'd be best to judge the state of our defence after 4-5 games rather than after the first one. Takes a bit of time to get going. For what it's worth, I think we'll be better than last season defensively but still not what you'd describe as watertight.