terrytini

22 hours ago, bielesibub said:

The lot down the sty will be fine.

They would have been anyway viruses can’t survive where there is no atmosphere.

12 minutes ago, AntrimBlack said:

I would say a number of the teams around us do not have players any better than ours, but they look better drilled and more determined.

Personally, I think this is the whole debate.

Unquestionably Purslow must be having the same thoughts.

What we don’t know is

(a) does he know some mitigating factor that we dont

(b) does he have a specific goal to be met or not ?

But there is surely no doubt this is the issue he will be looking at. 

1 minute ago, TRO said:

Ultimately, i think that is the most serious concern.....player regression.

Agree.

We can debate tactics, style, transfers, injuries, forever.

None of that would matter much if we were getting 100% every game from improving players.

7 minutes ago, AntrimBlack said:

Too many players have regressed since the start of the season. Some of the performances early on, when we were unlucky not to get wins against good sides, had made me optimistic that we could at least stay up.

That probably points to a deficiency in the coaching, as they should be improving with experience, not the other way round. I would say a number of the teams around us do not have players any better than ours, but they look better drilled and more determined.

That’s what I was trying to say, thanks !

16 minutes ago, TRO said:

I think the 64 million dollar question is......is the manager not good enough, or is the players not good enough......or both.

The worry for me is too many have got gradually worse, in individual performance, than when they first arrived.....that should send out alarm bells.

We are not one of the top clubs, signing ready made stars.....so we have to improve the players we sign.......thats what managers of the past, who did well, did.

The money we spent was a huge some in anyones language....I hear the 10 million per player argument.......but those players should be developed in to 20 mill pound players, if we are doing it right......we would be lucky to get our money back.

The value increase that we have achieved with Jack and John, should have been done with more......Suso to be fair, could argue this case.

In many of our players, i can't see a single attribute that looks improved, never mind the whole player.

I’m in the “ players are good enough” camp.

In my view they’ve shown in enough periods of enough games that they are, by and large, on a par with their rivals. So, not world beaters, but capable.

Id make allowances for their newness to the League/ Country/Club aswell when considering their abilities.

Weve had players like Bardsley, Westwood, and all the rest who have been considered poor here but successfully had careers elsewhere. 
 

Im afraid under Bruce I saw the same debate....but Smith got promoted with players that looked shocking under Bruce.

It seems to me we are at the same place now. These players look awful with increasing regularity. There is no question performance s have plummeted. Injuries, confidence, pressure, have played a part but that can’t explain it. We have definitely got worse.

Its the job of the Coach to get the best tune possible from the players he has. I’m not seeing that.

51 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

Not really. So far he is close to meeting his target. Other managers in a similar position were given time. Especially when the fans hadn't turned on them.

Quite.

 Getting rid is nowhere near as clear cut an option as some think, in my view. Personally my concern is why he can’t get the players playing at their best. It’s no use keeping him if he can’t do that ( and they won’t keep him in my view if that doesn’t improve, regardless of what noises they make now).

But without being privy to all the background, I’d say it’s harder to make that judgment from here than from, for example, Purslows Seat.

Im quite sure these owners will demand success. They aren’t used to failure. But they’ve clearly put Purslow in charge, and equally clearly he won’t want failure either - he will be judging that balance like we all are, he knows we aren’t far off target, but equally he sees what we see in performances.

Only him, the owners, and possibly the Coach, know the “ Use By” date on the quality of performances, and the bottom line on points.

He may get points without much improvement, or he may get improvement without points, he may get both, he may get neither.

But they will have a bottom line, I’m certain, that he needs to meet.

1 hour ago, TRO said:

Ditto.

I suspect Something is wrong behind the scenes........but I don't know what.

It has been looking that way. Who knows ? But who would be surprised to hear it ?

2 hours ago, bobzy said:

Fo' real.

The main worry is that we don't seem to be improving but, other than that, we're sort of roughly where I'd have expected us to be at this stage in the season.

 

This always happens after any bad run of form, though.

Agree but it’s the manner of the defeats really.

The players are regularly well below par, and it’s more and more frequently.

I could accept the points and the statistics, it’s not much away from what we’d have expected, but the performances are dire too often.

6 hours ago, villakram said:

 

A performance is needed more than anything this weekend.

This has been the case all season for me. Right from our first game I was more concerned with performance levels than results, as it was always going to be the case we would lose a lot of games.

Regardless of personnel, of tactics, of playing style, or of anything else, a consistently high level of performance would’ve got us the point a game we needed. Sadly they haven’t been consistent, or high....but most importantly the poor performances are increasing.

At Sheffield we were turning to each other saying “ where has this stuff come from ?”. By Watford it was shocking. Burnley showed the players the ability and that the Coach could still get that level from them.

Since then unfortunately we have only shown decent performance levels in the Cup...( and against Spurs). It’s even a debating point why that is.... almost as if the players self motivated for it ?

Ive no issue with mistakes, tactics, selections, or anything else. We were half way down the Championship a year ago. 
 

But the fundamental job of the Coach is to get the most from his players. Not all the time, but a decent effort shouldn’t be the exception.

I think it’s this that will prove his undoing.

21 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The virus just isn't endlessly infectious though; the r0 appears to be between 2 and 3, not infinity. Right now, an r0 of 3 means 3 uninfected people with no immunity, but eventually that 3 people will contain other sick individuals (either symptomatically or asymptomatically) and recovered people with immunity. In any case, as I say, governments will put into place measures - just as the Chinese did - that limit the population for the r0 to expand into.

Shorter: Lots and lots of people will get sick, but it isn't exponential because there is a factor (sick and recovered people) reducing the virus's possible growth opportunities.

I hadn’t considered some of that, thanks.

1 minute ago, leemond2008 said:

yep, got an unlimited pass and I don't have much else to do so I pop up after work and on a weekend, I'll go and watch any old shite, think I've been to see about 25 films since the end of September.

Fair enough ....not sure I’ve been 25 times in 58 years so I was a bit shocked lol..

4 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

There are very few places I ever go to that are less sanitary than Villa Park, that's for **** sure. 

How true. I’d imagine most of our immune systems would resist anything lol.

4 hours ago, leemond2008 said:

My Mom n Dad keep on warning me that I shouldn't go to the cinema at the moment (I usually go once or twice a week) they are convinced that I will 100% catch it from there, I told my Dad that I checked earlier and the film I'm going to see tomorrow currently has 11 other seats booked, I explained that as I was talking to him I was on a bus with at least 50 other people (all in close proximity) and coming out of an office with about 600 staff which is based smack bang in the centre of Town, sitting in a room for 2 hours with 11 other people is the very least of my worries right now.

Then I told him that if I stop going to the cinema I'll have to stop going to the gym, he felt that this was a good idea, I told him that if I'm going to stop going to the gym and the cinema then maybe I should get my shopping delivered instead of walking to the high street, again, he said its better to be safe than sorry, then I said it is probably for the best that we give our tickets away for the Chelsea game, his response was "you can't let it take over your life, you can still go down the Villa" the frightening thing is that he was deadly serious about all this.

So according to my old man, empty cinemas and gyms are definite no go areas, a stadium filled with 42,000 people crammed in and hustling and bustling to get through the crowds to get their half time pint is absolutely fine.

You go the cinema once or twice A WEEK ? Are you the choc ice seller ?

We aren’t down yet. Still a long way to go. We are awful at present, it needn’t last.

1 minute ago, The Hawk said:

3 managers who have had a long time at the helm at each of their clubs and a heap of stability to put in place those solid structures. 
 

Im sure Smith is aware of the option to play defensively, however our progressive owners, board and Smith are trying to bypass the defensive “survivalist” mentality and style of play of lower prem clubs in favour of a Leicester-type model. 

I’d agree if there was evidence of a good footballing plan/ system/ whatever.

But it’s not that we don’t play defensively, it’s that we don’t really play in a cohesive style at all.

I can’t help reminding myself of his first game in charge, we stood on the Holte and almost unanimously agreed there was an immediate improvement in what we were doing. I posted here to that effect. We straight away looked like players wanted the ball, wanted to use the ball.

Sadly, we don’t look like that now. Now that same group of us unanimously agree there us little difference between what we do now and what we did under Bruce. We certainly don’t play remotely like Brentford used to !

For whatever reason it appears he can’t get either the type, or the level,  of performance he - presumably - wants, anywhere near often enough. 
 

Whilst some of that is excused by new signings, tough League, injuries, whatever, this Club needs a Coach who gets those performances more often than not, at least.

He might be that guy. He has done it on occasions. Time is running out for him to do it.

I would still stick with him.

He needs to get performances from his players, I think they are as capable as those around us. He has done so in the past, albeit not enough. If he does that we can stay up.

There is still time.

(Those that think it’s the players - no point changing manager then !)

Having said that, if a decision was made that someone else could get those performances, that’d be fair enough. He couldn’t complain.

I think he’s just, finally, showing the strain of having carried the Club, all of us, on his back out of the Championship and into the Premier League. 
What an enormous physical and emotional effort it’s been. Unlike anything I’ve seen before - like Beckham against Greece but for game after game after game.

I just hope he finds something from somewhere, or that McGinn coming back gives him a boost.

3 minutes ago, jim said:

Last season when we were poor all I read on here was the players weren’t good enough. 
 

This season once again the players aren’t good enough. 
 

What about the manager? It can’t always be the players, he has to shoulder a lot of the blame for where we are. 

I agree. The same happened with Bruce. His most vocal defenders blamed the players for the most part, yet those players got promoted.

The same is indeed being said now.

But the players, whilst on the whole not world beaters, are roughly on a par with all our rivals. 

But only if the Coach can get the best out of them.

On ( too many ?) occasions this season, our players haven’t been at their best. On at least half a dozen occasions, they have been at their worst. Whilst they can be criticised for that, ultimately it’s the fundamental job of Head Coach to get the best out of them.

Im afraid that whatever the long term desire for stability, or a particular type of football, or the effect of injuries, or anything else, if it’s the case the Coach can’t get the best out of what he’s got, at least more often than not,  you need a different coach.
 

22 hours ago, VillaChris said:

If he stays it will only take a few scoreless games and the crowd will start getting on his back again 

I don’t agree the crowd were on his back I think he was backed every time he played. People were for the most part desperate for him to succeed. Compare that to, for example, Drinkwater, who has got dogs abuse from Game 1, minute 1 !

I agree we don’t want him back though.

4 hours ago, MaVilla said:

 

To be brutally honest I think our biggest issue is players not working hard enough, putting a shift in, hassling and harrying, basically giving the most basic of expectations......working hard.

On paper this team has the quality to stay up, but for some reason the mentality of some of the players seems to be wrong.

So yeah, developing players is a medium to long term thing, expecting players to work hard is an immediate expectation, week in, week out, too often, for whatever reason, the players only seem to turn up 50% of the time.

If we do get relegated, imo the single biggest contributor to that will probably be how soft our team is most of the time.

Working hard isnt something special that we should thank them for, it's an expectation, of which quite a few regularly fail unfortunately, for whatever reason that might be.

Agree.

Its the job of the Coach to get the maximum out of the players he has. They can all have off days, or falter in games, but we’ve had too many performances where too many haven’t showed up.

When we show up our quality is on a par with all our rivals, and we have an edge in Jack.

The Coach simply has to find a way to get our higher performance levels more regularly. He can do it, he has done it, but it needs to mor3 often.

Far more than tactics, substitutions, player types, playing style, for me, it’s this that’s the key.

And Saints, Spam and Burnley have all Conceeded more than us over that period

5 hours ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

Bottom of the form table. Not the place to be coming in to the last quarter of the season

I guess it depends how you’d like to view it  

In my happy little world we are TOP of the Form Table of those that matter

Last 5 games

Aston Villa 4

Brighton 4

West Ham 4

Watford 4

Bournemouth 4

Norwich 4

Southampton 3

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Unless they're planning to repeatedly contract diarrhea to get through it all, they're not creating demand, just bringing it forward in time. 

A run on bog roll so to speak ?