ThunderPower_14

I make no apologies for getting a bit emotional at thinking he might retire. Mings is my favourite player in the 25 years i've been following the club. It'd be absolutely gutting to know that injury ruined his career just as we appear to be taking off.

Seems pretty ominous, hoping it's not bad news

I really love 50 over cricket, it's a far better contest than T20. It's been quite sad to see the lack of support and coverage it's received this tournament. I don't know what it's like in England or other countries, but ODIs being mostly shown only on payTV has really hurt the popularity of the format over here. During the heyday of ODI cricket in the 90s and early 2000s, you'd have a quad series with Australia, Australia A and 2 travelling sides and every game involving an Australian side would be packed out and shown on free to air TV.

This place is wonderful, it allows me to engage on such a deeper level as a Villa fan despite living in Australia and having never been to England. It's hard to put into words how much this forum and the wonderful people here have been able to open my eyes to Villa and the game in general. My Grandparents were Brummies, moving over to Adelaide when my dad was 4. I found out when my Grandad died in 1996 that he was an Aston Villa fan, having just started to play under 8s football myself, and from then on that was my team. I still get a pang of nostalgia hearing the accent of the local lads when they're interviewed, sounds exactly like my Grandparents.

The Premier League is already a super league, and has only gotten stronger since the last time these desperate shysters tried to cling on to living beyond their means. We won't be invited to this, yet there are only 4 non-PL teams with a more valuable squad than us according to Transfermarkt. Premier League clubs would be insane to go. The likes of Man City and Arsenal will have to disgrace themselves and fracture their fanbase potentially beyond repair to play on average, about the same standard of football, maybe slightly less, depending on how many clubs they can convince to come along and be the Washington Generals of their circus.

You can feel however you want to feel about it, it's a reality of modern elite level football that we need to reach as wide as possible an audience. Her social media might attract people who are following for her looks but those people also see the 2/3s of her posts that are football related. You're talking like we're sacrificing on-field performance to have her in the squad which is ridiculous, she's a good footballer and has played regularly for us since we signed her because she's a good footballer. You're talking about her teammates getting frustrated with her but you have no evidence of that, you're simply projecting your own bias onto our women's team.

Potential leak shared in the reply, linking up with what he's said there. I still don't love the star, but great result if this is accurate.

I just love our team at the moment, McGinn's such a great captain. Works his socks off and gets stuck in hard, but if you let him slip by his vision, passing and shooting are deadly.

Complaining about only having 4 ways to get our lightning fast striker into space, it's a good time to be a Villa fan! I think defenders being terrified of Diaby opens up space for his teammates. And then in the 2nd half, bring on Bailey and we've got another lightning fast goal threat. You have to pinch yourself don't you. Remember the relegation season, playing turgid shit and getting spanked 4-0 every week.

Something i've noticed from Emi that I think is quite rare in professional sport, is that he's always posting photos on matchday from the ground with an "up the Villa" or something like that. I can't immediately recall a long term injured player being as consistent in publicly supporting his teammates. Just shows the buy in and great culture we've got going at the moment, and obviously the character of Emi. Hope he's back soon.

Man City would be genuinely regretting not activating that buyback and given the Scrooge McDuckesque bottomless pit of money they purchased their midfield with, it just shows how good he's become. What a player!

Again, I think the whole issue is based on how it's run. A VAR official should be simply advising the on-field ref to have another look without saying anything to further influence, and then the on-field ref gets a couple of relevant angles at full speed and gets to decide whether to change his own decision or not. It's so simple, it's actually comical how ridiculous the current situation is. Everyone hates it, it frequently doesn't work. If you need to look at something 30 times in slow motion, then it obviously wasn't a clear and obvious error. If you need to draw lines on the field, it's not a clear and obvious offside.

Agree completely with this. Countries everywhere who have been colonised have similar sort of statements. Indigenous Australians have phrases like "sovereignty never ceded" and "always was, always will be Aboriginal land" which are basically the equivalent of from the River to the Sea in intent and purpose. It's only controversial because Israel, through the support of Western powers, has managed to normalise the idea that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism which gives them carte blanche to accuse anyone who isn't active supporting Israel of racism. It's gotten to an absolutely insane, boogeyman proportions in some cases, fuelled by the media. Look at what happened to Corbyn. It's important for people to publicly stand up for Palestinians even when it's inconvenient for them to do so, which Anwar has done here, costing him his job and putting his career in jeopardy. He's displayed absolutely incredible character here, again.

Officially sacked now and hasn't backed down. Very proud of him.

And yet, the 2 days that Australians celebrate are Anzac Day and Remembrance Day, both of which commemorate WWI events. Which just further says to me that Australians (as a whole, obviously it's very different on the individual level) celebrate these events mostly performatively because we get a lot of our cultural cues from the UK and US, countries who have a far, far more significant military history.

I don't think Jack was a primadonna while here at all. He was the best player at the club and Smith did effectively run our attack through him, which made sense because of his quality. I don't think he ever held himself above anyone else at all. He was very friendly with his teammates, appeared to be quite well liked, and he regularly spoke of his love for Aston Villa. People slag him off for that now but it's not a lie, he's just an ambitious footballer who wanted to win trophies and play at the highest level. That doesn't make him any less of an Aston Villa fan. I think you'll find he's probably still close with a lot of his former teammates here and they'd welcome him back. I think you'd find that Unai would have no issue incorporating someone of his quality into the team, and nothing Jack has ever done would suggest that he'd throw his toys out of the pram if he wasn't having every attack played through him.

I'm someone who struggles with military based public holidays etc. Obviously Australia has basically no history of war apart from wars fought on the other side of the world, but Australia still tries to have a fairly strong national identity based around the defence force which bothers me quite a bit. England obviously has a much darker history of war and conquest and there is a lot more baggage that comes with celebrating that, and unfortunately it's part and parcel of honouring conscripted teenagers who made the ultimate sacrifice in WWI. You can't separate the two. I don't see an issue with how McClean does it. His position is strong and reasonable, and he holds it despite people using it as a culture war stick to beat him with. And it's that culture war stuff that really pushes this sort of thing into the limelight. Right wing types who want to push their militaristic views and want to normalise the celebration of war spouting outrage. It's all very American. Another factor to consider is that you just know the loudest and angriest of the people threatening him would be against a pride badge and would celebrate players refusing to wear it.

That pass was like something you'd see from prime Iniesta. Vision and execution at the absolute elite level. Amazing to think we plucked this guy out of Scotland a few years ago for £2.5mil and he's not only been an enormous driver of positive culture for us, but he's making passes like that.

But it does have it's own level of character that has been beaten out of our last couple of badges through the design by committee process. We're probably going to get something similar in broad strokes to what we've seen in this thread and across the internet, we just have to hope the designer can cut through that and design something that feels like it represents us.

I can't immediately remember a player anywhere developing such deep chemistry with his teammates so quickly. You'd think he and Ollie had been playing together for a decade. A huge credit to him and a sign of a very high football IQ. Sadio Mane is an excellent comparison.

Legend. Made supporting Villa fun again for the first time in a long time, and turned the culture of the club around and signed some of our best players. He laid a brilliant platform for Unai to build upon. And he's one of us! So nice to see the interaction between him and Unai and the mutual respect there.

This is completely incorrect. Having widely popular footballers in your squad has been important for decades. Social media is just the way that celebrities connect with their fans in 2023. There's a reason sports teams employ social media divisions and put a lot of effort into getting followers. She posts loads of Villa content, it's most of what goes on her insta, with football related stories basically every day. That's 15,000,000 people who might never have thought about Aston Villa having Aston Villa in their social media feed every day. When we complain that we have no chance to match the global reach of the sky 6, having a prominent, popular player like Lehmann helps to bridge that gap. Lehmann gives us access to fans that otherwise wouldn't consider us. Awareness brings in new fans, new fans means more money.

I also like the idea of replacing shootouts. It's an awful way to lose a knockout game. I've always liked the idea that after 120 mins, each side loses an outfield player every 5 minutes until a golden goal is scored.

Cannot believe that wasn't given a penalty, absolute garbage. Clearly forcefully pushed in the back causing him to miss his shot.