desensitized43

I agree there’s always a degree of hindsight. We don’t know if we’ve done enough yet or not. My (admittedly crude) grading is more of a reflection of how I feel we’ve done without that benefit of hindsight. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling just a little bit disappointed we’re going into the season with Nakamba, luiz, McGinn and sanson as our first team central midfield options. That’s not to be disrespectful to any of them. I think they’re solid mid to lower half premier league players which is why this will (IMO) be a consolidation season. Try and match what we did last year, but as we all know in this league if you aren’t moving forward you’re moving backward. I’d love nothing more than to be underestimating our business though.

Can’t help but feel the window really fizzled out for us. Started really well getting Buendia and Bailey. The Ings signing was completely out of left field and surprising in more ways than that. Didn’t feel he fit the profile of players we were supposed to be looking at but can’t argue with his quality. I feel like there was a real opportunity with the grealish money to go and spend another 30-40m and go get some real midfield quality we’ve been lacking. We know the money was there with the ESR and JWP bids. Did the club spend too long chasing them? Were we tunnel visioned? Got to feel there’s legitimate questions to be asked about why we didn’t kick on after that early success and go and get what the majority on here can see we needed. Even so, with the players we’ve signed we should be excited and confident of at least matching last seasons position but I wouldn’t be surprised if smith wasn’t here at the end of the season either. It’s a fine like between success and failure and there’s a real danger that for the first time under NSWE we’ll go backwards (a little, I don’t think there’s any danger we go down). Final score - 6/10 decent, not spectacular.

I think if you've got Taleban and IS shooting at each other rather than us I'd consider that a pretty good result tbf. My worry is that instability on the border with Pakistan might spill over into that country. You think people upset about a few humvee's and black hawk helicopters? Can you imagine if they managed to get their hands on what the Pakistani's have got?

We've done no better apparently. I heard a radio interview on LBC this morning where the defence secretary basically confirmed that when we packed up the British embassy in Kabul we left documents with lists of afghan informants, workers and job applicants, complete with their names and addresses just lying around. Rookie mistakes. This whole thing is a **** shambles from start to finish but the people who'll suffer the most are a bit on the brown side so you know Boris and his supporters for the most part don't give a ****.

https://www.premierleague.com/stats/player-comparison Check it out. Last 2 seasons. ElGhazi has 15 goals to Adama's 6. Adama has way more assists.

Some of it is beyond his control I admit. He isn't responsible for some of our players getting to the late stage of the euros (although maybe we could have forseen it?) or Grealish's disgusting betrayal. We booked too many low level opponents that our players barely broke sweat to play. We had 4 matches, 3 against pretty poor Championship sides and 1 that would have been against a good level of opponent to show where we were which ended up being against a very poor opponent. Booking a foreign team when it was always going to be risky whether they could play or not wasn't very clever. It's not like covid isn't a problem we couldn't have forseen. In those games the lineups we put out were strange at best. The young players that we then either sent on loan, benched or worse threw back to the U23s...what was the point of that? It did take a shocking amount of time to get Bailey into the country. What was he doing!? Injuries are more often than not a consequence of poor preparation so yes, I'd say he's partly responsible for the situation with Watkins and Traore. Doesn't it bother you even slightly that we don't seem remotely prepared for the season?

I'd add the complete catastrophe of a preseason we've had. We aren't even close to ready for the season at this point. Other teams have been able to get themselves into better shape than us. That's on him I'm afraid.

100% this. Those arguing we should have stayed because we had an obligation having started the process of "nation building" need to remember that in order for it to work the people have to want it. There's a massive proportion of that population who have been actively fighting against what we've been trying to do for years. We were there for 20 years, we sacrificed a lot of lives, we gave them a tonne of money and equipment, we even subsidised the wages of the soldiers and at the end of the day they cut and run. If at the end of this there's some kind of armed resistance to the taliban that wants to take to the hills and continue the fight I'd not be against arming them etc but it's their country, only they can make it better.

They didn't die for nothing. We went in there to degrade AQ's ability to strike at the west and "get" the people who planned 9/11. We did both of those things. The other stuff, the "nation building" stuff we did was mission creep. We should never have been doing it in the first place as it was never going to work.

The Quran isn't one homogeneous document any more than the Bible is. It's wholely contradictory in many regards and these Islamist (notice I say Islamist, not Islamic - ones an ideology and ones a religion) extremists have chosen to follow all the nasty bits and disregard the moderate stuff. That says more about them as people than it does about the religion itself. Personally I'd regard these people as fascists first, and Muslims second. They've co-opted elements of the Quran as a means of justification and a recruitment tool, nothing more. If they didn't have that they'd still be fascists, they'd just find another reason.

Likewise imagine you're the pilots of that plane and you know there's people clinging to the plane and likely under the wheels too and when you hit that throttle it's a death sentence to them but being ordered to anyway.

I’ve always said this country could do with more heroin.

In some ways yes and in others not. AQ is a shadow of what it once was and I’m not sure they’re in a position to execute another 9/11 (yet). certainly now we’re going to be seeing the fall out of what we've left behind. Executions of people seen as collaborators we didn’t evacuate and a **** tonne of equipment we’ve lazily left behind in the hands of the taliban.

Stunning to think the amount of time and resources spent in that country and we’re effectively back to square one within hours of withdrawal. When we went in I was just starting year 8 at secondary school and now at 32 years old this. Madness. I think when we went in there was obviously justification to “get” bin laden and AQ to make them pay for attacks against the west that eventually led to 9/11. I think we had no choice but to remove the taliban after they refused to hand over a dangerous criminal and stop supporting his organisation. Once all that was done, from that position of strength we needed to negotiate with these people to ensure they could come back but with clear guarantees etc that they wouldn’t be used as a launch pad for western attacks. What’s clear from all of this is that actually the taliban have a lot of support in that country and thus had to be part of the solution just as sin fein did in NI. Failure to do that entrenched the belief that we were propping up a puppet government with minority support that would always fail when we left. I feel for the moderate afghans and women that will suffer for this but ultimately you can’t enforce a western ideals of democracy, education, rights for women on a country where the majority don’t support them.

Agree and have had that argument with people on here before. If we could get some consistency out of Traore it'll make the 17m we paid for him look like daylight robbery. Traore's main problem will be that he's horribly one footed. Any team that's done their homework on him should be able to shut him down. On his day against a fullback that's on the slower side or unprepared he'll look very good. He's way better than Trez or AEG.

Behave None of those guys are going to look at us twice and you're mad if you think they are. Besides, the last player + money we got from Man City was Stephen Ireland. **** doing that again. It's the money or not at all.

I can't define legend. It's surely subjective. Although I was alive, I was too young to remember McGrath, though I acknowledge from what I've seen he was clearly a great player. The favourite players I remember were Laursen, Milner, Angel, Mellberg. Gabby was a good servant to the club but ultimately he was never in the same class of player as any of those or Grealish. That's just my opinion though.

Yeah but who are those players we need? Are they realistic? There's no doubt with the owners reported wealth we could make big signings but if we aren't (or can't for FFP reasons) going to do what Chelsea and Man City did in their early days and play moneyball then it's a multi-year project to get us to that challenging position. Asking a top player whose next 5 years will definitely be his peak years to commit that time to us, he has to believe we'll be challenging in that time. As I said earlier, it's a short career. He'll be a legend to me regardless if he leaves, provided he doesn't do anything disrespectful but it's clear that a lot of people on here don't feel that way.

So I think so too but it surprised me a lot of the people on here didn't think so. If he leaves and he does so in a respectful way (not doing what Kane is currently doing) and the club gets value, I don't see why that should tarnish him at all. It's massively disappointing and it'll hurt bigtime but he's pretty much carried this club for a few years now and if he genuinely felt like he couldn't achieve what he wanted to here I'd say go. I think if the owners are serious then they need to be able to convince him that the vision is real and achievable.

Do you not think he'll already be a Villa legend? The local lad who came up through the ranks, got us promoted and stablised the club, probably the best player to wear the shirt since McGrath, beating Blues after taking a sucker punch to the head, playing in an England squad that got to the first final since 66. If he wants to leave now to win medals because deep down he doesn't believe the owners can get the club there then who am I to argue that? Take the point about whether he wants be someone who forces the move or not but all players, even legendary ones get to the point where they look around, Shearer with Man U, Gerrard with Chelsea, Messi with PSG/Man City.

Bad comparison as Alan Shearer won the title before joining newcastle and Gerrard won numerous domestic and european medals. Milner and Barry turned out to be justified in leaving because they both won many things after leaving us and we won nothing. A better comparison would be Le Tissier. Jack needs to ask himself if he believe the Villa owners have the ambition and the means to get to where he (and all of us) want to be in a reasonable amount of time. Footballers careers are short. It's a massive gamble (edit- and a massive show of faith) for him to commit to another 5 years with us.

Provided the terms are right (i.e. that 100m isn't over the next 5 years or something mental) then we find that pretty difficult to turn down. I'm not sure we should do either. We make it clear he's welcome to stay on an improved contract but really feel now the decision is his. He's earned the right with his performances over the last few seasons and with his injury record that some have stated already (injury hit the last 3 seasons) who knows how long his shins have. I highly doubt he's going to have the longevity of a Messi or Ronaldo and play into mid-late 30s. The concern has to be about replacing him adequately. Even with 100m burning a hole in our pockets we won't attract anyone at that level, but we can certainly sign players in multiple positions that will vastly improve the squad and maybe take us forward. That needs to happen or others in the squad will start to get heads turned and we'll find ourselves in this position with Martinez and Watkins next year. It sucks we're in this position but if managed correctly we can still come out of this in a decent position.

The difference is that he's got no hope of getting himself ahead of Maguire, Varane, Lindelof, Bailly etc. He'll have opportunities at Villa to get some first team action with Mings injury record and only Hause to compete with for that 1st choice backup spot.

Being in heavily baggies-leaning Halesowen, this is a great time to be a Villa fan. My Baggies mates keep saying "we might aswell close the academy". That would be the ultimate act of self immolation. I think they're mostly just furious with their owners right now, not us.