ThunderPower_14

I do think he sometimes makes careless errors, but he also reads the play incredibly well, marshalls his fellow defenders around and is a leader on and off the pitch. We saw how much weaker our great defence looked without him. It's what happens when people only watch highlights though, they see the mistakes and don't see the 89 minutes where he wasn't allowing a highlight at our defensive end. I doubt Southgate just watches highlights.

Yep, I think the worm has turned here. He's not just a player with potential or an option off the bench anymore. My workmates are a mix of fans of superleague clubs and championship clubs and they've all got Jack in the work Euros fantasy league and think he should be starting.

I actually think there's a decent market for that if Grealish plays well at the Euros. He's legitimately one of the hottest names in world football right now. He's very good, but he's also cool, attractive and marketable. I don't think you'd see heaps of it in England where people live and die by their teams, but selling a lot of shirts in places like Asia, the Middle East and the US isn't out of the question. In terms of marketability he's potentially the modern Beckham. If Beckham had come along 20 years later you'd have seen his shirts everywhere like you do with Messi and Ronaldo.

If we've bid £30mil we may as well have bid £30. He's going to cost us a lot more than that. He came up as a junior with Southampton, he's their Jack.

I'd absolutely take him. We need a set piece taker and I think he starts for us as a midfielder regardless. Imagine Jack and Buendia running at players who are scared to foul them because JWP is the one who'll take the free kick. But, he'd take more than we're paying for Buendia. This would be a massive statement of intent.

It's natural for them to hate us when we're taking their best player. It's a normal part of football support. We hated Manchester United when they took Yorke and Young. City when they took Barry and Delph. Liverpool when they took Benteke. Let them vent. Can you imagine the thread on here if we lost Jack?

The only similar signing we seemed to make under Lerner was Young, who was a fantastic signing. Other than that it was all MON's expensive premier league experienced favourites and we ended up those long garbage contracts. The scouting network we have now seems so much better and the philosophy between the owners, Purslow and the manager all seems to align. I know we finished 6th 3 times in a row but I feel like our base to improve from here is so much stronger.

This was my first Villa shirt! It makes me nostalgic for both Tayls AND that striped shirt. I lost it somewhere along the way sadly

Mings is also the general back in defence and makes everyone else around him better. I think he's great for team culture and he'd be the same for England. I don't think anyone in the back 4 or keeper need to be replaced at all. Some competition/backup for Targett is all I'd worry about.

There's being rich and then there's being a billionaire. A billion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money and nobody should have that much. If you'd earned £700 an hour, every single hour of every single day since Aston Villa was founded in March 1874, you wouldn't be worth a billion pounds. JK Rowling didn't get paid a billion pounds to write books, she became a billionaire by turning her creation into a licencing juggernaut. When people are buying their Harry Potter dressing gowns, doormats and iphone covers, workers at the other end are not getting paid what they're worth so Rowling and her business partners can become insanely rich. You can't earn a billion pounds. A billionaire doesn't work 20,000 times harder than someone worth £50,000. You can only get it by exploiting the work done by others, who are paid less than they should be to line your pockets. For one person to have that much wealth in a world where so many people live in poverty is outrageously immoral. It's not about jealousy. As a supporter of Aston Villa i'm glad we have the billionaires we do, because having a billionaire owner is the only way to be competitive, but football would be better without billionaires, just like every other aspect of life would.

We had a very similar problem in the Australian Football League (Aussie Rules) a few years ago with a great Aboriginal player by the name of Adam Goodes. Goodes was a brilliant player, winning the league's best and fairest award twice. He was a prominent Indigenous Australian and was an activist against racism, and that came to a head when he was called an ape by a teenage girl sitting in the front row at a game. He pointed to the girl and she was removed. He then backed his stance in a very gracious and reasonable way publicly, stating that it was not a teenage girl's fault but a wider societal problem with racism. His activism (as well as other extensive community work) saw him named Australian of the Year. However as time went on after the incident, people in the crowd started to boo him. He was a tough, physical player and certainly earned the odd boo because of his play, but it wasn't really about that. People just booed, and crowds just sort of get caught up in the mob and boo. When you'd single out individuals and ask them why they were booing, they couldn't really answer except to say that they don't like him because of the way he carries himself etc, but he'd been in the league for over a decade before the booing started and was a widely respected pillar of the game. The booing was because he'd stood up for himself against racism and spoken out against wider societal racism. Racists don't like it, they boo, and then people in a football crowd get caught up in that and boo as well. When it's pointed out to them that they're booing for racists reasons, people are disgusted that you'd accuse them of that, but that's what's happening. They convince themselves that they're booing because they don't like the message or the person delivering it or how it's being delivered or whatever, but however you'd like to spin it, you're joining in on booing people because they're standing up against racism. You're engaging in a racist action. You're racist. The media didn't do enough at the time to call out this booing for what it was. It's debatable that would even have worked, because nothing garners more boos than telling a crowd not to boo, but the media needed to shape the narrative better and they didn't. Eventually a few years later a brilliant documentary came out about the last few years of Goodes' career and the booing, and laid bare exactly what was going on. It was incredibly powerful and I hope some people learned from it.

That's incredibly gracious by the manager there. It does raise a great point about apologising for mistakes. I don't believe refs are genuinely corrupt but they do make mistakes. It feels like it's the same in all sports where apart from egregious errors, leagues will come out and bend over backwards to defend bad referring decisions, which just angers the aggrieved supporters even more. I sometimes wonder whether it's a betting thing, with the league not wanting to be held responsible for bets that are lost because of bad referring decisions or to have any controversy about that, so they just go straight into denying a problem and political spin mode. People will have a lot more time for referees if they aren't held up as being infallible.

In the Belgium squad as well which is a good result for him after a decent season. I can't help but think that El Ghazi missed out on a much weaker Dutch squad while having equally as good a season.

I like Jack on the wing personally, I think he's got more space out there to get the ball and take off with it where he's at his most dangerous. I'd also like to see him shooting more, he's got a great shot on him. I feel like we'll get more out of Jack at LW and a new CAM than we would out of Jack at CAM and a new LW for the same money.

That thread started in 2014. Reading a few of the recent pages on that thread, they seem pretty reasonable in general. They think he's great and they'd offer 70,000,000 pounds, but we'd never accept that. I really don't think there are any teams who can reasonably afford Jack this season who don't have bigger needs. Man City can't buy Haaland or Kane AND Grealish. Not without selling some key players.

El Goalzi scored twice this year against Chelsea. City can have him for £80mil

I'd love to see a striped shirt like this as a one off. My first Villa shirt was the 99/00 home so I've always been partial to them

I just don't think any club that can afford him will be willing to pay that much in 2021. He'd have to force his way out and I don't think he'd be at that point yet, I think we'd have to have a season where we stagnate. Even Man City would have to shatter their own transfer record.

Yep, agree completely. The midfield is the first priority for me. I think even with our current wingers we'd score plenty if we didn't spend games getting walked over in the midfield.

Top 8. Ideally Jack plays every game, but if he's out for a period of time, the best indication of progress for me would be that we're still a good team while he's out.

I know this is just white, but the texture through this kit is absolutely beautiful. Lovely shirt. Letting the texture be the feature and stripping everything else away.

I actually think the Jack to Arsenal meme is hilarious. It's their supporters running with something silly because it's funny, not unlike our Rashica thread on a wider scale.

It's bizarre. I've had 2 dealings with them where they made a mistake. Both involved emails over months, with sometimes weeks between replies from them. First was an NBA Jersey where they sent me the wrong one. They eventually figured out that they couldn't supply the one I had originally ordered, so just refunded me and let me keep the one I received for free. Then an NFL jersey which hadn't arrived after 10 weeks, no tracking. I emailed them and again, after several weeks of emails they eventually agreed to send me another one. The next day the first one arrived, so I emailed them back immediately telling them to cancel the replacement. They never replied to that email and about 2 months later another identical jersey arrived. In fairness to them, both mistakes eventually worked out in my favour but it took forever for them to organise themselves.

Main targets for me would be 1-2 dominant midfielders and right winger. If we can start to get control of the midfield we become a very dangerous team. At the moment when we're struggling, teams are just waltzing it through there and when we win it back we can't maintain possession. Ideally we'd have a player in the starting 11 who can score free kicks as well given Jack wins so many of them.

He's irreplaceable for a club in our position, so he's a must keep. I don't really get the inkling he's off, but we've obviously been burned before. The club just needs to keep showing our ambition and investing to get Jack where he deserves to be. We've made some really astute purchases since we came up from the Championship and we need to continue to ramp that up now.