NurembergVillan

I bought it and started a game with Stockport County. Had a dreadful pre-season losing 1-0 a few times to unheard of opposition. Kept tweaking the tactics though and started the season with a 1-0 win. Am 5 games in now and have won all of them, scoring 9 and conceding 2. I'm having problems getting my head around training though. Seems like my players are generally unhappy with the level of training. I've not touched it too much. Any tips?

I don't know how old you are, but if you think Bannan is good you'd have spiffed in your pants watching this bloke -

Because if I'm running from a bear I don't need Barry Bannan pinging 60 yard passes round the forest whilst I'm doing it.

You just paste the full link in (http etc) and Bob's yer auntie's live-in boyfriend.

Dwight Yorke after 13 secs away at Coventry - http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/yorke-pulls-a-fast-one-1575455.html

I didn't talk to NB/Warrior, although Warrior have got a football office just down the road here. Don't think I'd have fancied that. Reebok have an amazing office in Canton. I've been there before, and had a chat with them this time, but they didn't have the right role for me. Great office though.

We're **** crap aren't we?

And Wigan beat us 3-0 so I'm glad we're not playing Bournemouth!

Yep. Can't wait to see Harry Forrester back in a Villa shirt. Champions League here we come!

They're spanking our arse here.

Losing again...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/20863510

What Baltimore's like did put me off a bit. I could've gone there right now, but decided to hedge my bets and hope for NYC. If it'd have been somewhere like Boston it would've been a much tougher choice.

Football advisor is a bad turn of phrase on my part. What I'm trying to say is that we'd have benefitted, and still would, from someone in there who understands and has experience of the football industry. I'm checking out of this conversation now. It's become about O'Neill and I'm bored of reading it for the Nth time on VillaTalk. The key point for me is that our board lacks people with genuine football industry experience. Whether that's somebody like Graham Taylor, who is a former football manager AND chairman, or Peter Kenyon who has worked in sporting goods and been a successful football club chairman, many of the mistakes we have made - during MON's tenure and since - wouldn't, I believe, have been allowed to happen.

On that day in 2010 the teams looked like the below. I don't think we fared too badly in terms of what we spent of fees and wages. Where we came off worse was value for money. Tottenham 01 Gomes 03 Bale 04 Kaboul 20 Dawson 26 King 32 Assou-Ekotto 05 Bentley (Lennon 73) 06 Huddlestone 14 Modric 09 Pavlyuchenko (Gudjohnsen 87) 18 Defoe (Crouch 72) Substitutes 27 Alnwick, 19 Bassong, 07 Lennon, 08 Jenas, 12 Palacios, 15 Crouch, 17 Gudjohnsen Man City 38 Fulop 03 Bridge 05 Zabaleta 28 Toure 33 Kompanyyellow card 11 A Johnson (Wright-Phillips 77) 24 Vieira 34 De Jong 25 Adebayor 32 Tevez (Richards 88) 39 Bellamy Substitutes 37 Nielsen, 02 Richards, 04 Onuoha, 15 Garrido, 16 Sylvinho, 08 Wright-Phillips, 14 Santa Cruz Aston Villa 01 Friedel 05 Dunne 24 Cuellar 25 Warnock (Heskey 74) 29 Collinsyellow card 06 Downing 07 A Young 08 Milner 19 Petrovyellow card 10 Carew (Delfouneso 74) 11 Agbonlahor Substitutes 22 Guzan, 02 L Young, 23 Beye, 04 Sidwell, 20 Reo-Coker, 14 Delfouneso, 18 Heskey

I was going over there for a third interview with Under Armour. I was working for Umbro at the time and we were being bought by new owners - a company called Iconix, who have their head office in New York. Iconix made me a great offer to work for them but remain in Manchester as Creative Director of the Umbro brand, so I accepted that and that's what I do now. I could have gone to live in Baltimore, but instead I'm staying here and hoping to move to New York in the next few years.

But with the players that were signed the wage bill should never have been that high. We didn't have a squad (we had a core of around 14 players who warranted those wages and earned the league placings) that justified that outlay. Conversely, with the money we were spending we should have had a better squad that would have finished higher up the league. In 2010 at the start of May we were 5th in the league only on goal difference from Spurs and 3 points ahead of Man City. We went to the Etihad with a tired squad, got beat 3-1 and ended up 6th. If we'd spent the money better we wouldn't have had Luke Young, Beye, Sidwell, Reo-Coker and Heskey on the bench. Roughly £25m of players there and about £250k a week in wages. Whilst I've been quick to criticise Hughes' work at City, Vincent Kompany was in their team that day. He cost roughly the same as Luke Young.

That's pretty much what I'm trying to say mate, yes.

That's not really the point I'm trying to make, it's just the rabbit hole the conversation has gone down. I entered the conversation to say that I felt Randy invested enough money in the first 3 years to get us 4th place but that it wasn't well spent. A football advisor then, and indeed still now, would have been a huge benefit to ensure that we were getting value for money.

I'll use an analogy - You buy a house that needs "modernisation". You buy it with the intention of doing it up to then increase the value beyond what you've spent on the house and the improvements. Say it costs you £200k and by spending another £80k you can make it worth £400k. You hire an interior designer to spend the budget you have in mind believing that when's he's finished you'll have a valuable asset. You know nothing about interior design and let the designer spend the budget however he sees fit and take his word that what he proposes to buy will satisfy your ambition. After 3 years the work still isn't complete and everyone who comes to view the house can see that ridiculous money has been wasted on expensive taps in the spare bathroom, outdated chintzy curtains and an un-necessary loft conversion. A different interior designer, or same one being monitored by an expert, would have spent the same money (or less) achieving your ambition to invest into the property in order to make it more valuable. All you've been left with is a load of expensive furniture that you can't even sell on eBay, a nursery, and garden that wins "best lawn" every year. That analogy actually turned out better than I expected...

If MON was the main football man though, his argument would be "give me £65k a week for Heskey and we'll get CL football and all it's monetary benefits". With nobody to challenge that he had a free run at it. The finance people are partly responsible, but if the policy was speculate to accumulate there was nobody in the club to ensure that the speculation was being undertaken appropriately.

Aren't you arguing against yourself there? If his decision making in a sport "he fully understood" was holding his team back then surely an advisor was essential in a sport he didn't understand? I think Browns fans would argue whether it was a sport he fully understood though. If there had been a GT type figure around then MON wouldn't have been able to run rings around him throwing lucrative contracts at players who didn't deserve them.

If it's anything like Star City I'm staying away.

It did, but our aim was top 4 whilst theirs was Champions hence them spending even more. Spurs have invested heavily, yes, but similarly they've sold a lot of players for profit down the years too. Carrick, Berbatov, Modric - all players they've sold and then re-invested into the squad. That's another failing of ours. When we've sold star players we've not replaced them with like for like.

Lerner's first mistake at VP was not having a proper football person around him in the early days. Someone like Graham Taylor as an advisor would have helped things massively and we likely wouldn't be in the mess we are now.