BOF

by JimCohen The off season! I love it. After what has been one of the worst seasons I have ever experienced in 23 years as a Villa fan, we can now start speculating about who we will buy, who will stay, who we will play and who will be our manager. It’s great! We can forget the season just gone, draw a line under it as the players like to say, and think about the season to come. But I think we can draw a lot of positives from this season too. I will try and convince you that I am not mad. 1. Young players coming through. It doesn’t matter if you think they are good enough for the Villa first team or not. We have raised the experience levels and development curve for a lot of our younger squad players this season and they will either go on to have great careers with us or be sold off for more money than if they had just played a few reserve matches and cup games. Players like Lichaj, Herd, Clark, Baker, Weimann, Gardner and Carruthers came from relative obscurity for most fans outside Villa Park. Albrighton, Delfouneso and Bannan gained more valuable first team action. Look at our reserve team now compared to most other teams and you will recognise most of our players. Not because we are Villa fans and we know our squad better, but because our reserve and youth team play for our first team so much more than other teams. Yes this means our first team is weak and we need more players, I think we all know that. But if one or two of these players can come through to be regular first team players in the seasons to come and the others go for a couple of million or so between them, then that works for me. I think Clark and Weimann will make it myself. Both look like top players in the making. I would like to see Herd make it as well, but I fear his passing may not be up to scratch. His tackling, work rate and shooting seem good, but what separates great CM's now seems to be their ability to retain the ball. His pass ratio this season was well below what should be expected of a starting CM for most teams. 66.43% if anyone cares. Lichaj looks solid and could surprise a few, but is a late developer. I think he will play Premier League football and I hope it's for us. He is a great versatile talent and seems to have an eye for a goal too. For Baker, Gardner and Carruthers it is too soon to tell, but despite one shocker against Man United for Baker I thought he did very well indeed and the other two showed glimpses of real talent. Bannan, Delfouneso and Albrighton need to step up, they went backwards this season in terms of performance, but the point of this section is playing time. Experience. This is invaluable and they all got a lot more than they would have at other teams making them better more experienced players and potentially more attractive prospects for other teams if they don’t make the grade for us. We sold Luke Moore for £3.5m remember! 2. It will never be this bad again! We broke every record going in terms of bad performances this season. Goals scored, goals conceded, home wins, points tally etc. A real shocker! We have had 5 managers in two seasons if you include the stand-ins. We have sold 3 of our best players, our skipper was diagnosed with a serious illness, our leading goal scorer was out for the majority of the back end of the season, the fans were against the manager and not offering the best support and we had the worst manager in our history! But we still stayed up! Surely if we fix a few of these things, players get fit and well again (please God) and we all get behind the new team and manager, then we WILL be better. 3. We don’t own the player registration for Joey Barton. So there you have it. My reasons to be optimistic. Role on the transfer speculation thread... This post has been promoted to an article

No, Mick really is not ace.

Damnit

Then let me be the first to say 'well avoided'.

Exactly Mike. And if you have spent your life well, being good to other people and doing nice things and living in what a Christian might call a good way, then you never know, God might let you in heaven's back door if it turns out you were wrong all along

Rangnick is 170/1 on Betfair

The title of the FA home page is "England EUFA Euro 2012 Finals squad". Fairly amateur, guys :?

Jack Butland is the stand-in goalkeeper? Ohhhhhh ... kayyyyyyy ...

He has always done well for the national team.

Defoe probably.

Anyone else see a passing resemblance to Jigsaw in Woy's photo on the FA webpage

Coyle is still a good manager I believe. He just needs to turn it around at Bolton and his stock will rise again. I wouldn't bring in a manager who is coming off a bad season just in case that's the start of a run of bad results.

Doubt it. All fans can be vicious. If they're worried about that then I'd suggest a change of profession.

Carroll is the right choice. I bet he does very well. I think it'll be a brave squad selection if the Neviller has anything to say about it (and he does).

Paul Lambert. My colours have been nailed since Houllier was in charge.

No, his older Swiss brother, Lucien

Favre (not a chance)

Aww, cool! We want pics.

Yeah true. The game of football is that little bit cleaner now he's gone

I just can't see it Morpheus. I know what you're saying and you are right about our situation but I just can't see it applying to AVB. It's slightly insular to think that his reputation has been overly affected by one year in England. The rest of Europe will still think very highly of him. He doesn't need to come here to rebuild his reputation. Though I'd love if he did.

I would love to zorb. Not the ones where you make it move like a hamster ball though. I mean the one where you're secured into it and launched down a hill.

The main problem with AVB; and Richard alludes to it in his earlier post; isn't even so much the hiring of the man himself, but it is the calibre of player (and their inevitable wage demands) that he would want to sign which would be the problem. Even if we were able to get him here and pay him, there's just no way we would be able to keep him happy in the transfer market especially with what the board have learned about wage bills in the past few years. That, for me, is the biggest reason we won't be hiring AVB any time soon. That's even ignoring the fact he probably has aspirations of managing a CL side or one capable of getting there next season.

Any part of you that can legally score a goal can be offside. So you'll need a knob chip too.

Absolutely. Yes of course. We may see them at the weekend at Villa Park, but Bodymoor Heath is their place of work. It's where they are most of the time. And if a manager is planning on being here for any decent length of time then things like the academy, training facilities and the infrastructure make his job easier. It's not the only factor of course. There has to be things like ambition and funding from the board, not to mention a good working relationship with the board, but does the academy and facilities influence someone? Absolutely yes they do.

One of the greatest and most prolific divers the game has ever seen. Arguably THE greatest.