ThunderPower_14

Not really, given how they got their goals. Mings offers something in the air that we've missed this year without him. The brilliant seasons of Konsa and Pau have softened the blow a little but but Mings is a colossus back there, especially dealing with crosses.

Yep, as good as Konsa and Torres have been this season, Mings' command of the air isnt something either of them get close to. You can't help but feel that's probably a clean sheet with Mings in the side.

Desperately need some changes

Yep this one for me as well. Prime Benteke for us was like Drogba. No idea why he couldn't make it work anywhere else, he was just so good.

Purslow is bang on there.

There is absolutely no way he misses the Euro squad apart from injury, and he should probably start alongside Kane.

Oh wow I think the headed ball is pretty iconic for Bournemouth. Big change. This would be like us dropping the Lion rampant. Despite that it's clean and reads well. No idea how protective Bournemouth fans are of their current logo.

Fulham!

What a wonderful move by Bailey and the composure to find Watkins there. Wonderful goal!

I know the standard in the UK is that publicly money isn't used for club stadiums, but I don't really agree. Manchester United would have provided an absolutely enormous amount to the economy in Manchester over the journey. Major sporting stadiums everywhere else in the world rely on public funding, with the stadium effectively a partnership between the local/state/county government and the team, acknowledging the economic benefits brought to the area by the major professional sports team. Almost all NBA and NFL stadiums were built at least partly using public money. Every single stadium in Australia is publicly owned and redevelopments are entirely publicly funded. Those stadiums bring events and tourism, they bring legions of fans to the area on matchdays, they fill up the surrounding pubs and restaurants. People will attend a city they'd never otherwise attend for a game and stay for a weekend, spending money in the area. They are a point of pride for the area, and the club is likely followed by a big percentage of constituents. Why shouldn't stadiums receive public funding?

I feel the same way. The current system means the right financial move is to sell our most talented young players and buy someone else's, and if we miss the CL this year we'll likely have to sell someone like Ramsay despite being fairly powerful financially. I don't want clubs to fold, but surely these outcomes are not what anyone involved in football wants, clubs selling their best academy kids while football ultimately becomes a battle of who can best game the FFP system.

I'd argue that Liverpool signing Salah hasn't really affected us negatively. We've never been really directly competing with them for places in the league, they've been a clear level above us since he joined. What Salah and his performances have done is help to elevate the Premier League to it's current status of being the clearcut best league in the world. Which has in turn helped us sign good players. We're trying to build something here, but we're absolutely leveraging off of the back of the Premier League being strong. We're currently favourites for a European trophy. We've attracted a manager and players we couldn't have dreamed of a few seasons ago. A stronger Premier League means a stronger Aston Villa, and the stronger we are the more chance we have of being able to get a foothold in this top 4/5/6 to then build towards potentially challenging for titles.

double post

We can afford the likes of Diaby, Bailey, Carlos and Pau because our rival signed good players and the financial strength of the league started to dominate the rest of the big leagues. Those players wanted to come to the premier league because it's the biggest league and with TV money, we can afford them. They wouldn't have come to us if we were the best team in the Belgian league, they came to us, in part, because the Premier League is the best league in the world. That doesn't happen unless our rivals are also buying good players. As an added bonus, the product is also better to watch.

What if he's fired complacent staff who weren't great at their jobs for better qualified staff he knows and trusts? I think it's fairly normal for a boss to come in and drive a culture change and turn some of the staff over for what they perceive to be the betterment of the organisation. Whether Heck is doing the right thing or not remains to be seen, but it's not automatically a problem that there's a turnover of staff and some of them are disaffected.

I don't entirely fault his decision to leave under Gerrard, but to go to Chelsea when they've been absolutely chaotic with their squad changes over the past few years was a silly decision.

Absolutely, it is similar in Oz, but it's basically always met with pushback even when it's a very positive public project that will enhance the use of the city for a large proportion of the residents. I live in Adelaide where we had Adelaide Oval, another historic old sporting ground, remodeled just over a decade ago. There was strong opposition from the usual nimby heritage obsessed types who similarly were complaining about encroachment on public parklands, and despite that the stadium has been a complete success and has enhanced the area and the entire city by any measure. I'm very supportive of maintaining or at least maintaining the level of green spaces over an area. But this is exactly the sort of scenario where the heritage listing can unnecessarily get in the way. We've already got pillars on the Aston Hall side of Trinity Road, and then there's a playground, a basketball court and more sporting facilities. In a perfect world you wouldn't have a stadium stand hanging over the road like it does, but Villa park has been open for 130 years. Aston Villa leaving the area for a modern stadium elsewhere would be of great detriment to both the heritage of the area, and the club. The grounds of Aston Hall are not going to be meaningfully impacted by us say, filling in the corner between the Holte and the Trinity. Obviously this is all pointless discussion if the club don't actually want to expand.

I'd rather have the best players playing in the Premier League. The Premier League being stronger ultimately makes us stronger, and gives us the opportunity to buy better players as well.

This should be a recruitment war for the ages, but he'll go to Madrid because nobody else can afford him due to FFP. It's a shame, it'd be great to have him in the Premier League.

Where we'd want to expand is mostly taken up by the playground and basketball court space anyway. I'm generally against the wild overreach of heritage protection, it's a problem all over the world. There has to be a balance but there are groups of people for whom cities must exclusively be monuments to the past and any push towards progress so that they can be enjoyed by people is resisted. Nobody is asking for Aston Hall to be demolished but the fact that we're barred from expanding slightly further into some trees 200m away from the hall is crazy to me. Surely the basketball court that is currently in that space is more of an affront to heritage than the historic stadium of one of the oldest football clubs in the world.

This is utter garbage. He's not a bad team man and he never has been. He was our captain.

I don't see what this achieves that yellows don't. Just give players yellows for these offences consistently and watch them disappear.

16000+km club represent

This is the thing. The recent approach of surveys and shoehorning in bits of our history has meant we haven't had a genuinely good badge (for it's time) since the 80s. That round badge is clearly very dated now, but I think we can all see that it was a pretty good badge for the 70s when it was first used. I can't speak to what the idea was with the 90s/2000s Ellis era striped badges or the process that was used to design them. But the modern badges since Lerner have had what I think is a clearly flawed process where we've ended up with effective designs by committee, having to try to please too many people and ultimately genuinely pleasing very few of them, and that goes for the round badge on this year's kits as well. Heck came in and talked about "leaving it to the experts" and I thought finally, we'll get a badge that isn't bogged down by this stuff, but of course it's turned out that his badge change was just a cost cutting exercise because it was going to be too expensive to do a proper rebrand. Our approach hasn't got us a good result for 30+ years and we need to change it.

I hope you're right. For the shirt especially, it's perfect.