ThunderPower_14

He play acted weak between points but didn't miss a beat during them. It was pretty clearly in my eyes a tactic to get Murray frustrated that he couldn't take advantage of an injured opponent and to destroy himself mentally. Djokovic isn't going to come out now and say "oh yeah I was totally faking it".

I was cheering for Murray and I wanted to see him win, but he let himself get caught off guard by probably the oldest trick in the book. Baffling for a top professional.

What more is there left to say? That's absolutely indefensible. Yes, i'm blaming the players as well, but they're Lambert's players. He brought most of them in, and he's picking them. He's telling them how to play and if they aren't good enough to play that style, he's the one that is staying the course while the ship is sinking.

He's probably committed more unforced errors in the month of January than anyone at the Australian Open. How does a professional footballer pass the ball straight to an opposition player while under no pressure time after time after time?

What is there left to say that hasn't already been said all season.

At least most weeks we can defend. This is as bad as we've been under Lambert.

At least most weeks we can defend. This is as bad as we've been under Lambert.

Sanchez really, really needs to get that giveaway open pass out of his game. It happens way too often.

I work as a Policeman (in Australia, not Britain, but still it's effectively the same legal system) and from time to time we'll deal with someone who has broken the law but "doesn't recognise our authority" or has "opted out of Australian law" etc. lolle Good for you mate. You can tell the magistrate all about it.

I like Murray and I think he's actually pretty underrated. He makes himself incredibly difficult to beat, by playing smart tennis, good angles, and getting what should be clean winners back into play time and time again. He plays like Lleyton Hewitt in his prime. The combination of clever strategy, good ability to read the play and elite level movement is really good to watch. Hewitt got overtaken by the supermen in Federer and Nadal, but I think Murray has gone to another level of this sort of thing and can make life very difficult for them.

Fantastic news for Australian football. It's brilliant to see what Postecoglou has done with this side. The players seem to be really developing as a group and despite some strong input from our greatest ever player in Cahill, it looks like this generation of Australian footballers might be a bit better than they seemed at the world cup. It seems like some members of the Asian Football Confederation are already getting a bit annoyed with our success though Coming over here, dominating our football confederation

It's a huge boost for the club that he's signed on. He'd definitely have gotten a gig at probably 15 other Premier League sides at the very least. Here we are at our lowest ebb in decades and players who could go elsewhere are sticking around. That's a terrific sign that the players believe in what's happening here. Losing Barry, Milner and Young when we were a good football team on the cusp of a European spot was frustrating because they felt like it wasn't going to happen for them at Villa and that they had to leave. Clearly Delph believes he can fulfill his ambitions here.

Whoever scouted him needs a raise. What a buy! An injection of exactly what we needed in the front third.

There is a photo of my wife and her friends on my fridge that has a similar effect and I do a double take every time I walk past it. Here:

I think Gil playing a full game is precisely the wrong time to be dropping Benteke. Let's see how he goes with a bit of movement in the front third. If he's still shit, drop him.

The guy down holding his head not only took himself out of the game, but he blocked other defenders from getting near Cahill apart from who was out of position anyway. The second goal though comes down to Cahill being absolutely world class with the ball coming into the box in the air, and he always has been. Ultimately, he keeps getting in positions and keeps putting the ball in the back of the net. Sometimes you're lucky, but if you're lucky that often you're doing something right.

Pure fluke at this stage with reds. Obviously Gabby's was outrageous, and the others are what they are. I think yellows are a better indicator of a lack of discipline because of the sample size, and we're about mid range in yellows.

That is an incredibly solid 4 posts.

Obligatory "Why don't we get Tim Cahill on loan for the rest of the season" post It will be a long time before Australia gets another player of Cahill's quality.

Southampton are already on 42 points. In previous seasons 70 points is usually what you need for top 4 so Southampton feasibly need just 9 more wins from their last 16 games so more or less 50% ratio for rest of the season dosen't sound that hard. Mind you it shows a) what a good achivement it was and what a total bottle job it was that in 08/09 we had 52 points around this stage although the premier league was a lot stronger back then as indicated by the teams in the champions league. I was having this conversation with some mates the other day. Randy Lerner really came at the wrong time for us. I mean I know he arguably kept us from getting relegated, but he came and invested heavily at a time when the top 4 was an impenetrable fortress that was only broken when Man City got mega-rich. These days it's arguably easier to finish 4th, despite being much more difficult to win a title. If Randy buys Villa a few years earlier, his relative wealth quite possibly means that he has enough time to break down that Sky 4 glass ceiling before Manchester City come and take a massive financial dump on the entire competition. If Randy buys Villa a few years later (assuming we weren't relegated in the mean time), the period where he is keen to invest coincides with Liverpool falling down the table, Ferguson leaving United etc, and maybe, just maybe, we manage to muscle our way in to 4th one year like As it stands, Randy bought the club, spent some money, was made totally financially irrelevant by Man City, and then decided it wasn't worth continuing to invest because making the Champions League was now all too hard. I don't know why I think so hard about this stuff because it just upsets me, but man Villa fans have been dealt an awful hand over the past decade or so in terms of promise vs success.

I think our current style might actually work better in the Championship where defenders are going to make more mistakes. At least Lambert I guess has shown he knows what it takes to get a side up. Try telling Leeds or Sheffield Wednesday fans that it's sometimes better to just get relegated. We're a big club, but so are Leeds, and I just don't see that we have the right people in place at the moment to get us straight back up.

Barry leaving hurt the most. He left when we were on the cusp of challenging for that top 4 spot, as our captain and best midfielder in his prime, to go to a side that wasn't in the Champions League yet. I feel like Barry leaving was the turning point for our club under Lerner, because we replaced him with Downing who wasn't as good and never really felt like one of us. The fact that we couldn't keep him no doubt assisted Milner and Young in packing their bags over the next couple of seasons as it became obvious that we'd peaked. Milner left because Barry had paved the way IMO. If Barry stayed, who knows where we would have ended up. Would MON have left? Would We have finished higher than 6th the following year? I hate football sometimes.

Grealish has looked lively but let's face it, what has he actually done to help us score when he's been given a chance apart from win the odd free kick? I mean I guess being the only person in our front third who isn't doing their best corpse impression is a bonus, but he's not quite ready yet.

I promised myself that if the initial takeover thread fell off the first page of Villatalk, I wouldn't let myself get excited again until we had something a concrete. Paul Allen is an unrealistic pipe dream.

You liked it when I posted it before In a world where the Rock, Austin and Jericho exist, this promo isn't even on the radar.