allani

I was just looking at the league table too. Yes Canberra are bottom (but with one of two matches in hand on the teams above them) - but also the league seems ridiculously competitive. I think there's something like 6 points between qualifying for the end of season play-offs and being bottom - depending on Canberra picking up some points from their 2 games in hand. So it's not like they are a huge way off the rest of the teams at all. I don't know what the actual standard is like but it does seem to point to the idea that there'd be some opportunities to loan players between the two clubs. The only slight disappointment was that their top scorer (who I think is scoring at more than 1 a game this season) is 35 - so I'm not sure that we could nab her and play her up front with Rachel.

I was saying the other day that it seems strange that the artificial restrictions on transfers (through two specific windows) might well come under a legal challenge soon - now that clubs can be penalised for missing their financial target. Forest are already asking how not selling Johnson in June for £10m less than they were able to sell him for in August is financial mismanagement. The collapse of the January transfer market this year further complicates things. There's a lot that can happen between August and May and one of the biggest options that clubs have to deal with unforecasted costs is to sell valuable assets - namely players. The fact that for most of that time selling players is forebidden means that a major tool for helping to balance the books has been removed. It also means that clubs with a healthy FFP position can now use this to target clubs struggling with FFP to force them into selling players at below their market value. Which again flies in the face of FFP supposedly being there to help make the game be run more sustainably. Whilst I understand that the accounts should be based on the football season - I think the relationship between accounting rules and transfer windows needs to be looked at. I would imagine that most clubs are now looking to give themselves the opportunity to sell assets at the end of the accounting period - rather than basically being in a position where the last chance to raise revenues through player sales is 8 or 9 months previously. Clubs will also have a better idea of their final financial position in May / June than they would have done in August (i.e. they can tie spending into actual performance rather than projections) and so I suspect that June might become more active as teams either utilise extra funds or try and generate some last minute revenue. I don't think that us moving our reporting period is concerning - more a recognition that the transfer market is changing: with the winter market looking like it is becoming more a chance to loan players and then clubs being a bit more active in June and then possibly later in the summer window. I would be very surprised if many clubs don't do the same / haven't already done it.

I quite like the fact that there's already a Women's team as well. It would seem a great opportunity to help develop both our Men's and Women's teams.

I think Kosta (right back) is further ahead than Sousa (left back) at the moment - he's played a handful of CL matches and did pretty well against Man City. Although my Arsenal supporting mates were disappointed that Sousa was allowed to leave as they thought that he'd be one of the youth players who would get the odd first team appearance next season (cups, etc) - I think we'll probably look to loan him at least until Christmas. As an aside - they also said there were some rumours about discontent at their Academy and the feeling that top prospects weren't being pushed through quickly enough - so I wouldn't be particularly surprised to see us pick up one of Sousa's ex-team-mates in the summer.

Livingstone or Inverness would be a decent options for the V connection. Both likely to bounce around between the bottom of the Scottish Premiership and the Championship so unlikely to have a European cup implication. Also it would be a great way to find out whether a prospect from warmer climes is likely to be able to do it on a cold Tuesday night in Sunderland - that would seem positively balmy after a winter playing in the highlands!

Our new back-up keeper has penalty shoot-out form too. I have wondered in the past whether teams should consider just having a specialist penalty keeper on the bench. Someone who maybe isn't great at catching crosses, commanding their box, etc but just has superb reflexes and good movement. I think I've seen it happen a couple of times (but can't remember when) and also that one time that happened the "match" keeper had had a great game and was taken off and the "penalty" keeper than proceeded to not save any of the penalties he faced and so "lost" the match.

PS - Having a quick look through the first of those sources and something interesting struck me. Should it be possible for a team to change their penalty kick order AFTER the coin toss to decide who goes first or second (but BEFORE the first kick is taken) and if so would anyone actually do so? This was after the point they made about their being a proven advantage to taking the first kick (if the shoot out concludes quickly) but a similar advantage to go second (if the shoot out goes on longer) - which is odd as I thought it would be the other way around - the more times a team have to score their kick to progress to the next sudden-death round the more the pressure is likely to mean that someone misses. This would be the same as serving first in a tie-break in tennis would feel to be a bigger deal the longer the tie-break goes on because you have more chances of winning the tie-break on your own serve. I don't know but I think if you knew you were going second then maybe you'd load the middle takers more to try and steal an advantage and / or wrestle back if you miss the first - whereas maybe if you go first you want to front-load the penalty takers to try and grab the initiative? This might be something that gets taken into consideration in the report - if so apologies.

The best strategy is probably just have 5 very good penalty takers with nerves of steel and have them all practice a lot. That way it doesn't matter what order you put them in!

On the flip side (and I'm sure that this isn't the way that Emery thinks) if he went to Barcelona or Real Madrid and failed to win everything (and the expectation would be that he won everything) then that would end up being the way that he was remembered rather than all the trophies he's won along the way. As he knows from PSG - winning La Liga wouldn't be enough. He'd have to win domestic and European titles - and probably in the same season.

I mean you'd hope that there is a significant enough difference in the motif for it not to be confusing at all.

But doesn't that then mean that if you put your better penalty takers in later in the shootout then they are more likely to miss? It would be interesting to know how often a team puts their best penalty taker at 5th and then compare the number of times their penalty is either irrelevant (or just not even taken) against the number of times they score the decisive penalty. In my head it happens loads - but that's probably down to people noticing it more often when a good penalty taker doesn't get to take one.

To be fair I have also heard rumours that @Vive_La_Villa can't sweat and is a regular visitor to pizza joints a long way away from Bournemouth...

I agree with a lot of what you say. However, I think where I see it slightly different is that I believe Emery would see winning La Liga with Villareal or the PL with us as a much, much bigger deal than winning it with Barcelona or Man City. I mean "anyone" could win La Liga with Barcelona. But winning the CL with Villareal would be beyond special. I just think all the time there's a chance of competing here, there's actually fewer clubs that he'd leave to join than we might think. And yes maybe I am looking at it through claret and blue tinted glasses - but at the moment I do think there's a chance here to do the things he wants to achieve and (importantly) the time to do it. But either way I'd be more surprised about him leaving more a massive club like those you mentioned than I would if he left for a club closer to our kind of level. For example, maybe Atletico (supported by ambitious owners) would be a bigger threat than Real. Winning titles with Atletico would elevate him to a level of eliteness higher than winning them with Real. But again the number of clubs in that category is probably pretty small - assuming things continue to go well here.

It is highly unlikely that the crest will be used in every scenario. The new lion (or what has been leaked / trade-marked) is, I think, so much more in tune with Aston Villa and more marketable than the one on the Purslow badge. It's our lion, it's facing the right way, it's bright, it's bold and it will work well on a huge range of merchandise. I also think that it will look brilliant at a larger scale - e.g. around the ground, club facilities (and because it is almost identical to the one that is there we can take longer updating it too without it looking confusing - whereas with the claret lion facing the other way any discrepancies would stand out more - as highlighted by the number of comments about us having two badges this season). I don't like the light blue / yellow contrast on the crest (the limitations of which have been pointed out at length and I think almost everyone agrees with - especially at smaller scales). But I do think that the shape of the crest is better (there are no others of the same shape - all "shields" are not the same - so that in itself has advantages) and I think the lion is unmistakably the Villa lion and so those elements are both improvements. I don't know how we resolve the colour issue. I think changing the blue to claret would make the lion stand out better - but the crest then looks less different to West Ham (claret background with a yellow motif). The claret lion does stand out well against the blue (the colour contrast is one thing on the Purslow badge that does work) but I think the crest is pretty much the only time this would be the case. You can't put a claret lion on most of our leisurewear / merchanise (which is typically claret) without putting it on another background colour. Whilst the lion needs to work in monochrome / without colour (i.e. glass etching, etc) having our lion change from claret to yellow in too many different scenarios seems (to me) to be more confusing or at least just as confusing as having two badges. I wouldn't be adverse to a claret lion - in some ways it fits very neatly into the Villa story - but I do worry that it is more difficult to use in stand-alone scenarios. I also think that a yellow lion gives us more consistency when it comes to supplementary elements within the wider branding. For example, (whether you like the font or not) the 150 year thing looks better in yellow than it would in claret or light blue. A three colour palette gives more options than a two colour palette (or four v three if you want to include white as an official Villa colour). Although I do also agree with the comments made that we're "claret and blue" and yet there is precious little claret in our crest where the dominant colours are "yellow and blue". But I think that could be solved by finding a way to add more claret highlights / details into the crest. To be fair it's kind of difficult for any of us to know until we see the full breadth of the branding. (For example as much as I dislike the Purslow badge for being an uninspiring, generic rehash of the default "plug and play" design of - make it round, make the motif simpler and reduce it to a two colour palette - I have to say that I do like some of the monochrome versions and think they look quite cool.) My view is that the lion motif is the key to Aston Villa and our brand not the crest (in the same way that the Liver bird is more important that Liverpool's coat of arms). And this is probably my biggest issue with the Purslow badge - it feels like we changed the lion just to make it work better on the crest. I'd much rather we found ways of changing the crest to work with the lion (and just to be 100% clear in my view - the new, trade-marked version; the Purslow version and the Lerner version have all failed to do that satisfactorily). I do like the idea that we're adding detail to our motif rather than stripping it back to its simplest form - to me that feels like an acknowledgement of our history and also that we do things our way. I am sure that not everyone will feel the same way - but for me the lion is 1000 times more important than the shape of the badge. And it feels like last year we compromised the lion too much in order to fit in with the desire for a round / two-tone badge.

Every club "has" to sell if they want to spend in the summer. It's all about having as much control over the players that you sell as possible (i.e. those whose financial value or cost exceeds the value they add to the team and the cost to the team of losing them). There are also plenty of positive rumours that suggest we are in a much better position with regards to FFP than many other clubs - especially when you take into account the fact that we have a lot more headroom than most in terms of increasing things like: sponsorship deals, merchandising figures, match day revenues, TV money, prize-money, etc. Most clubs will struggle as the new rules / timeframes kick in - there aren't many clubs that don't have any negative rumours about FFP at the moment. I think the Everton / Forest breaches mean that everyone is a bit on edge about it. Finally, we know that Emery and Monchi have a track record of finding players at a lower cost and transforming them into key players - neither are reliant on just spending big money on high reputation players. So if our competitors are in a similar FFP boat - that's probably actually going to be a huge advantage to us.

I disagree with the first point and to an extent the second. He's been to Arsenal and he's been to PSG and he knows that at those types of clubs you get interference from above (owners, etc saying who they want to buy and how they want to play) and below (players who think they are bigger than the team). He works much better where he has control - to manage the team as he wants and with players who will listen to him and do what he wants them to do (or at least try to). I think that's clear from what he has "demanded" to come here - he's got complete control over the team, he's got the coaching team he wants, he's got a DOF (for want of a better term) who he's completely in synch with in terms of the type of players that he wants (ability and personality wise). Everything is perfectly set up for him with the arrangements here. It's very unlikely that he'll get that anywhere else - at Utd, Real Madrid and Barcelona he'd almost certainly have big name players bought just to make the owners look good without any idea of how they will fit in. (The same applies to Monchi - I think he's seen that he was made the scapegoat at Roma where the owners basically told him what players they wanted him to sign.) Obviously, his reign at manager is reliant on three things. Success on the pitch (i.e. the club need him to be helping us achieve the best we can AND he will want to be competing for honours), support off it (i.e. we need to be giving him the tools to try and do what he wants us to be able to do) and his personal life. However, Emery seems to be one of those guys who would take more personal satisfaction from winning say the Europa League with us than winning the Champions League with Man City. That's not saying that he's not ambitious - almost the opposite. I think privately he wants to be THE reason why the club is successful and not the fact that they are the team with the most money. Of course, he would never say that - it will always be about the team, the club and the fans coming together to achieve things together. He's tried the "biggest" club thing at PSG and I don't think he enjoyed it. That said - we did of course manage to convince him to come and join us and leave a team where he was delivering success. But I do think that was partly down to the PL and having the chance to come back and prove himself here. So I think we were a unique opportunity at a very specific point of time. My current thinking is that he will stay here for a while (4 or 5 more seasons), he'll make us competitive in the PL and have a few cup adventures with us and I think we will land some form of silverware. We (and he) will be regarded as a huge success and the model of a well-run club with a proven track-record of over-achieving. Then I think he'll eventually decide that he's achieved everything he wants and he'll go back to Spain and become manager at a smaller team, closer to home and take pleasure in guiding them to the best period in their history which might just be promotion to La Liga and staying in the division. He probably won't win as many titles as Pep but like I say I think he'd prefer to look back at his career and point to every title he does win, every season in which his team is competitive and the meaning that that had to the club and the fans. He's in it for the honour not the glory (although of course he wants to win things too!).

I love the fact that they then explain the design of the shirt by saying that the main body is maroon.

I'm glad you did - because I'd missed the significance of the work "recuse". And I can only say that I hope that's a word that NV has to use repeatedly in the coming months / years.

My statement that we might not have the exact same deal was primarily based on me thinking that they had qualified for CL football when their deal was announced (although now I am not sure whether that is true) whereas we are only in the Conference League when ours was agreed. I also think that I saw that their shirt sales were higher than ours in some FFP wrap-up piece I read a few weeks ago - although again I can't remember what I read or confirm that that is the case.

Ok (and please bear in mind my other very positive posts on Ollie today!!!). I think there are two areas where he could improve and become an even better player. (1) His touch when coming towards our goal rather than when going towards the opposition goal is at times a bit more heavy. (2) When he's got his back to goal against a more "agricultural" defender he's not strong enough to hold them off and he's not quite cute enough to win enough free-kicks. I'm not expecting him to throw himself to the ground all the time - but he gets fouled an awful lot more than the number of free-kicks he wins suggests. I thought he did much better against Fulham and Forest where he seemed to present his case for being manhandled a little better and ended up winning a few more decisions. But he's improved massively since Emery and his coaching team have arrived for sure. Pretty confident that whatever records he doesn't end up breaking this season he'll be challenging and beating next season.

Absolutely - doing it in a crowded penalty box against a top 6 team in another matter. However, there are some really encouraging signs there. I've just watched Dougie's first goal back this morning - every single Villa player (well all 11 who were on the pitch anyway!) touched the ball in the build up to the goal. Ollie dropped deep early on and laid the ball back - but that dragged one of their players well out of position. And then Ollie's movement in the box was almost as good as it was for his goal. He makes a very similar movement - the guy marking him follows him and it leaves an absolute acre of space for Dougie to run into. Very clearly two examples of the kind of dynamic involvement that you and I have discussed in the past. Rather than standing still waiting for the ball to come to you or waiting for someone to create a chance for you - these were two good example of Ollie making something happen to create the space for him or a team-mate to exploit. Yes - we need to be doing it against next-level defenders too or when teams don't engage with us in deeper positions but it's another clear change for the good and an example of good coaching and a player willing to listen and adapt. (Another criticism I have had of Ollie in the past is that he doesn't get enough assists - he's nailed that this season and put bells and whistles on the end of it at the same time.)

Well based on the post that immediately followed yours I think we can now safely assume that our deal is significant. Maybe a push to hope that it matches Newcastle's but I think we can assume that it will be big. It might also help explain the rumour that there's a £10m bonus if we sell a certain number of shirts (which was being used as an example of Heck being incompetent) whereas maybe it's just a sign that we're being really punchy about projected sales growth with a very big player in the market.

That is probably the most exciting sentence I have heard for a while! Thanks.

I don't think it is a coincidence that they've signed / agreed deals with both Newcastle and us.

I would be very surprised if it has to go to a fan vote. It's not like he's changed our colours to be royal blue and white and replaced our badge with a porcupine - so I'd be surprised if the FA get heavily involved in terms of protecting a club's heritage and identity. If Newcastle are allowed to change their away strip into the Saudi home kit without any opposition from the authorities then I can't see them getting involved in this.