HalfTimePost

I just think this 'Lets be the new Dortmund' mentality has gone too far now. What with Lamberts new music video and everything.

In 28 Starts (+ 2 appearances from the bench.) this season, Westwood has had (in 2457 minutes of football): 2 Yellow Cards 0 Red Cards If we include Cup games and his games for Crewe (35 starts and 2 sub appearances), he has had: 2 Yellow Cards 0 Red Cards Definitely a walking red card.

...Bayern. However in Germany I guess they just have the one. Where as over here the money is a glass ceiling for a lot of clubs. United, City, Chelsea will outspend everybody and then Spurs, Arsenal and Liverpool are in a group well above the rest of the league. So I do kind of agree with where you are coming from.

Agreed. If we're going to sign a Belgian wide attacker, it is more likely to be that Lestienne than Mertens, it would fit in better with Lamberts philosophy. Mertens is just an absolute non-starter.

Plus the guy who started this Mertens rumour was also adamant that we were signing Kelvin Leerdam and/or William Kvist in January.

It would take about £10m to get Mertens. Cannot see it, he will have more successful clubs than us in for him if he is for sale. Think he would work well in our system mind and maybe help keep Benteke. Maybe possible as a 'right, lets show Benteke we need business' move. But I can't really see that being Lamberts style.

I'm just going to assume we dont have a 'The Groundsman Thread'. Mat Kendrick @MatKendrick Congrats to #avfc groundsman Jonathon Calderwood on his move to PSG. I'd say the grass isn't always greener, but with Jon it always is We can't even keep our groundsman from wanting to join Champions League clubs! /s.

You should apply for a job with the diplomatic service. Haha, probably not the best worded bit, just think that when we get going our passing is superb. But then sometimes we are just a calamity and make very poor decisions. Can definitely be improved but we have a good starting basis.

Theres no chance Benteke will strike. He may throw his toys out of his pram a bit in preseason, at worst he may not turn up to some preseason games but I don't see that happening. He wont strike during the actual season though. No chance. Lukaku will be getting a much more important role at Chelsea next year and Benteke will need another season similar to this one to compete with that and be first choice for the world cup. Benteke will be going to the world cup pretty much whatever happens next season imo. It's that starting place he needs to compete for.

....thats the same quote.

There must be a way, one of the editors at WhoScored.com is a Villa fan, might be worth asking him to have a look into it in more depth. I think we have the basic building blocks to be able to play the possession game. You can see it there sometimes when we have confidence and in our element. 2nd half vs United comes to mind we started to play some really nice stuff and at times we pass it around brilliantly. It's just a lot of the time we cant find that final ball. We pass it around and rely on either Benteke to make something happen or a wonder pass from Lowton. Aside from that, we havent really got a lot in terms of creating. Some players will do a bit every now and then, like westwood vs Norwich, but other than Lowton I dont have faith in any of our players to find that killer pass. Not saying nobody else creates anything, Gabby has done well on the counter attack of late for instance, but I mean in terms of when we are passing it around the edge of the box, we can go on forever, and eventually fall back and hoof it up because we just dont have the vision in the side. Best example of this is against Bradford in the cup. Eternally passed it around and not one player on that pitch could pull something out of the hat.

No thats the same interview we've been talking about, slightly reworded by the daily mail. Nothing has changed.

Why? Bent is never going to be part of Lamberts plans. He is everything that Lambert does not like in a player. Bent is gone whether Benteke stays or goes. Why would we keep paying Bent £90k+ a week to warm our bench just because we lost Benteke? It is a very real possibility that both Bent and Benteke will leave this summer. The only difference between the two is that we'll be actively trying to move Bent on.

70k

On the floor I think Benteke is a good passer, last few games he has really helped dictate possession with the team. It's the long balls from Guzan to Benteke that are our biggest downfall in possession I think

This is going to go one of two ways, or both. 1) The clubs like Everton, Us, Newcastle that are big enough to challenge for 5th/6th will start taking it more seriously. Currently it's a 'we cant get into the Champions League' and thats that. CL is all footballers care about and where the money is. Would be great to get into Europa now and essentially have a back-door into the Champions League. 2) Champions League also-rans that get dumped into the Europa start relying on the Europa League to secure them Champions League football if their domestic seasons aren't going well. Spurs, Arsenal I'm looking at you. It should, at least make the Europa League relevant though. If we can get into a position to enter the Europa for 2015 that would be cracking but Im not sure I can quite see it.

Good.

Lets just be clear. It wont be sorted until the window closes. Even if he is staying there will be reports all summer that he is moving. Even if he signs a new contract tomorrow, there will be reports all summer that he is moving. Even if it is sorted before pre-season, It's not going to be sorted before the window closes in the media and other clubs' eyes. The only way this gets sorted quickly is if we sell him quickly, which we wont. It would be nice if he signed a contract and the media left it alone but it isn't going to happen.

A look at the stats, all pulled from Squawka. I apologise for the length of this post, and dont expect many people to read it haha. PASSING Possession We managed an average possession of 48%. This puts us 13th in the league, just below Newcastle and Fulham on 50% and just above WBA on 47%. I expected us to be a bit better in this to be honest as generally when we get going we are very good on the ball. Unsurprsingly the best teams in this area are Arsenal, Man City, Liverpool, Man United and Swansea. The bottom 3 being Reading, Norwich and West Ham. We just need to keep that up, get some confidence into some positions and possibly some experience to calm things down when sometimes we panic. You can see this when we score and then concede almost instantly, you can feel it happen. I dont particularly want more experience, to be honest you can probably get around that panic with just better players. Westwood doesn't often panic like the likes of Clark and Bennett do. Interestingly, our highest Possession was 57% when we lost 1-0 to West Ham and our lowest possession % was 37% when we beat Liverpool 3-1. I think this gives a bit of credence to us needing to find a talented CAM, somebody who can find those defence splitting passes and chip in with some goals. We can counter attack brilliantly (i.e. 3-1 vs Liverpool) but when we are passing the ball around on the edge of the box we just are not finding that last killer ball enough. Con talks about Bannan but his final ball isn't good enough, he may have good stats but he hasnt made the impact a player like that should have. A left-back version of Lowton will also be crucial to get more balls into the box. Chance Creation This is backed up with Chance Creation, we created 334 scoring opportunities throughout the season, meaning on average we create 8 chances a match, just under once every 10 minutes. I think we've gotten better since January we have been great going forwards and I thought we would have made many more than this. Bottom 3: Sunderland, Stoke and Reading Top 4: Liverpool, Spurs, Man City and Everton Game with most key passes: 16 in 1-1 Draw with Baggies Game with least: 4 in the 4-0 loss to Spurs Passing - Accuracy 15th in this too with 78%. Think we can build on this, again when we are in our element we are a very good footballing side we just still have this thing where we pass backwards without finding that killer ball, get it back to Baker or Guzan and then lump it forwards, lose possession and then defend. Where we could have just tried a more intricate pass with a higher chance of success than lumping the ball to Benteke. Top 3: United, Arsenal, Swansea Bottom 3: Stoke, Reading, Norwich Best Game: 88% Villa 3 - 2 QPR Worst Game: 66% Villa 3 - 3 Everton Passing Style Average Passing Length: 20m Backwards Passes: 15m Forwards Passes: 21m Long Balls: 42m Average pass length is 12th highest is the league, quite good in fairness. I would like to see it come down a bit because I think our long balls are just stupid at times. Benteke wins a lot of aerial duels but I'd be surprised if we keep possession much from them. Top 3: Norwich, Newcastle, Readin (all 22m) Bottom 3: Arsenal, United, City (all 19m) Largest average pass length: 23m in 3-1 win over Liverpool Lowest average pass length: 16m in 2-1 win over West Ham We made just under 14000 passes. 7000 less than Arsenal (top) and 2000 more than Stoke (bottom). Interestingly: Game with most attempted passes: 541 in 1-0 loss to West Ham least attempted passes: 199 in 3-3 draw with Everton Most completed passes: 460 in 3-0 loss to Man U Least completed passes: 131 in 3-3 draw with Everton Again shows that when we have all these lovely passes, we just dont have that final ball, the killer pass. Most long balls and lowest possession = beat liverpool 3-1. Most completed passes we do all season: 3-0 drubbing to United. If we dont counter attack successfully we fail. Fortunately we have this base where we can make all these passes to build from. Put in a key CAM and we could really rifle up the league. DEFENSE Defensive Errors We made 28 defensive errors this season (9th highest). 8 of those led to a goal being conceded (11th highest) fully expected us to be higher up here. Some of our errors are very basic though, it needs sorting. Most errors: Arsenal, Newcastle, Wigan, Liverpool Leading to goal: Wigan, Arsenal, QPR, Newcastle Most errors: 4 in 1-0 loss to Fulham Least: 1 in 3-1 loss to Everton Convinced Squawka have some errors in their stats here! Defensive Actions Total: 2601 (1st place, 200 ahead of Spurs in 2nd) Clearances: 1654 (3rd, 6 behind 1st place Spurs) Blocked Shots: 177 (2nd, 1 behind 1st place Sunderland) Interceptions: 770 (2nd, 9 behind 1st place Southampton) Quite clear this. We are asking a lot of our defense, they are the most active defense in the league by a long way, 10% more active than the nearest defense to them. The midfield needs sorting to give them more protection. Hopefully our recent move to 4-3-3 with Gabby and Weimann protecting Bennett and Lowton has helped a bit rather than leaving them out to dry. Least active defenses: Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool I meant to go on a bit further with this but I cant type any more haha. There are a lot of Stats over at Squawka and it makes for quite interesting reading

Jordan Adams @Jordanadams001 Not ITK but Stephen Ireland has just changed agents to W3 Soccer Management, LLC, who are based in the USA..

I think we could keep Benteke this summer, however, if we don't Lambert could do a lot with £30m. Add to that £8m for Bent and maybe £3m for the likes of Ireland, Given and Hutton and we suddenly have £40m. I wouldnt expect us to spend all of that but we could maybe see us spend £30m over the summer and January. It could certainly see us take a step up in our recruitments, where we may have signed say a Bennett we could instead sign a Cresswell. Im against selling Benteke but for circa £30m we could hugely improve the squad (depending on his replacement)

Next season I think. New manager, no money to give them to get their own squad, likely to lose atleast Fellaini, possibly Baines, unlikely to reinvest all the money they get for those players.. if we keep Benteke I think we will finish above Everton

Zero chance of Bony, very similar to Benteke this season, has had an absolutely explosive season. We missed the bus on him and then signed Benteke instead. Which is fine, infact it is incredibly encouraging to know that we were after both of them. It's clear that that type of player (in terms of style of play, potential value of the player etc) is crucial to Lamberts system, as such I wouldnt expect us to sign Aubameyang (who also had a similar season to Benteke/Bony in terms of impact at Saint Etienne) as a replacement, I agree if we were to sign him it would be to play in Weimann/Gabbys role. Presuming the links last summer to Aubameyang and Bony were real + us actually signing Benteke, that is 3 strikers who have all had superb seasons after being relatively unknown by mainstream footie fans a year or 2 ago. If Benteke leaves just have to trust Lambert to do it a 4th time.

Also, only Messi and Ronaldo have scored more in 2013. That means Benteke has outscored the likes of Aguero, Van Persie, Rooney, Falcao, Lewandowski, Ibrahimovic etc etc. So anybody thinking it was going to be a nice case of asking him politely to sign a new contract and him doing so with no fuss about moving is living in a dream world.

If Benteke leaves this summer it's going to be an absolute nightmare just to hold on to Weimann and Lowton for August. We all know the plan though, buy young, up coming players with resale value and try to build the club up around them. Theres only one reason why you choose players with resale value. It's to sell them. We cannot compete with the top 4, hopefully we find a lot of gems all in one go and manage to take the league by storm and push for Champions League and be the next Dortmund but it's very unlikely. We are more likely to find players on the up, build them up and mix them with players from the academy, all going well we sell a few on for huge sums of money and go again. Yes, it sucks to lose Benteke after 9 months but if we get £30-40m for him then its a good start to that and we have to put our faith in the scouting network to find another.