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A lot of tickets have been sold today.

 

while you've still got an ounce of self-respect left, resign.  If you don't, you deserve all of the stick and more that's going to be heading your way.

Tantamount to bully boy tactics right there

 

I don't see it like that.

He has actually had another option, improve and put out a side worthy of Aston Villa. He has consistently failed to do that and we look as bad as ever this season, despite him having the best squad he has ever had.

It deserves repeating time and again; 19 games; 2 wins and 7 goals.

I am not sure how anybody can even begin to defend that.

A point would be a good result.

I quite like the arena with the female guards flashing their beeeeewbs for no real reason. Slogged through about two and a half hours of that to level up to 10 to get me the Bushman.

I do like the game, but it really is just a prettier Far Cry 3 in the Mountains.

 

I think we should be 12th 10th because the likes of Benteke, Vlaar, Delph, Sanchez, Okore and Guzan are good players and that spine is no worse than a number of clubs and capable of far, far more.

Lambert has been restricted in what he can spend, as have Swansea, an significantly smaller club, yet we can't compete on the pitch with them.

It also doesn't explain away Lambert tactical inefficiencies. How do we play? What is our means of breaking a side down? Why has there been no improvement in two and half years in style of play or quality of football? We have gone from ineffective lumping to ineffective square passing. It's nowhere near good enough and that is down to the manager that is clearly out they're depth.

 

What are they good players based on?  Benteke has scored goals (for the same manager) in one season - next to sod all else.  Delph has played for Villa and produced next to nothing.  Sanchez wasn't even heard of until the World Cup; same as Vlaar really (a Dutch guy I know ridicules him from his time in Holland; I've always said he's wrong).  Okore has this season come back from a bad injury - having previously played in Denmark.  Guzan now looks a good keeper... one that was released by Aston Villa.

 

In short, there's absolutely no basis for this "we should be at least 10th/12th" message that people are saying.  None at all.  None of these players have achieved this in the Premier League.  None.  I just don't understand where people are getting this "should be at least 10th" stuff from.

 

I think the time has come for Lambert to go, but some of the chat on here is as if we're bottom of the Premier League by a significant margin with no hope of getting out.  We haven't been in the relegation zone all season - and unless Hull beat Man City away, we won't be in there having played Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool twice.  If we don't see an upturn at all by the end of March then I'll join in with this panic.  Until then, though....?

 

Hilarious that people think there is "no harm" in protesting and creating an even more toxic atmosphere by the way.  How can that even be the case?

 

Compare those players with their equivolents at Swansea and Stoke and ask yourself is what they have any better? The answer is no.

This squad isn't full of world beaters, but then you don't have to be particularly impressive to do ok in this league, such is the lack of quality. I base my assessment of Benteke, Vlaar, Okore, Delph, Sanchez Guzan on what I've seen them do at the Villa, internationally and weighed up against their opposition.

Lambert has spent a lot more than Mark Hughes and Laudrop/Monk in his time here, I actually think he has spent and recruited by and large pretty well when spending £4 million level sums. Gil looks decent, I liked what I saw of Kozak too. But the tactics he deploys, the obvious lack of coaching we see, the inability to improve all feeds the poor results we see.

I don't need bold or italics to say that losing 48 out of 99 games as Aston Villa manger is not acceptable. I don't need to use bold or italics to show that winning 2 games and scoring 7 goals is unacceptable. The results and the awful performances speak for themselves. The manager should have been sacked in May and should certainly be sacked now before the time to reverse our slide to the second division cannot be halted.

I think we should be 12th 10th because the likes of Benteke, Vlaar, Delph, Sanchez, Okore and Guzan are good players and that spine is no worse than a number of clubs and capable of far, far more.

Lambert has been restricted in what he can spend, as have Swansea, an significantly smaller club, yet we can't compete on the pitch with them.

It also doesn't explain away Lambert tactical inefficiencies. How do we play? What is our means of breaking a side down? Why has there been no improvement in two and half years in style of play or quality of football? We have gone from ineffective lumping to ineffective square passing. It's nowhere near good enough and that is down to the manager that is clearly out they're depth.

Its looking likely to me. The run of form we have been on for the past 38 games is relegation form, as its yeilded just 33 points. Worryingly though, our form is actually getting worse with the past 19 returning just 12 points. Extrapolate that across a full season and you have a side with 24 points and 14 goals.

The worst side in the league, Leicester, should really have humped us 5 or 6 and we could have had no complaints. I am not sure where to confidence comes from that we can get the results we need against Hull or Stoke.

 

But how will it be worse? I don't see how it can be worse than losing and not scoring.

It can be worse because you'd hope that the games against Hull, Stoke, Newcastle, West Brom, Sunderland and Swansea will allows us a chance to improve. 

 

They're easier fixtures which is obviously an advantage and you'd hope Gil and Sinclair will make the impact we're all hoping they will make in those games.

 

And let's be honest, if it's not going to improve in those games then we're going down.

 

Protesting could be detrimental to the team and mean that improvement has no chance of happening. You say "it can't get worse", well it can get worse. Every game that our current form continues for is it getting worse. And if we protest and get on the team's back then there's every chance of them failing to improve results to the standard we need them to.

 

Gil looks a good player, but he is just one man playing in the same set up that has mustered 7 goals in half a season of football. That is an incredible ask, for him and Sinclair, who also looks reasonable, but has barely played in two seasons, to come and change our fortunes.

The movement in midfield and inability to get close to the front man is part of our problems and it stems from the lack of coaching they receive and the tactical ineptness of the manager to muster a plan or way of breaking a side down.

We have good fixtures away at West Brom, at home to Palace and Sunderland and we took two points and failed to score. We’ve taken 12 points and scored 7 goals since we beat Liverpool in half a season. That isn’t just relegation form, its bottom of the league and well adrift form.

The fact this isn’t isolated, but yet another horrible run of many over two and a half dismal seasons is indefensible.  Lambert should have gone several times over and its staggering that he is still here, with his ineptitude matched only by that of Lerner.

Save the funds and sack the manager, who unfortunately just isn't up to it, as his abysmal record proves.

I hate it when a Villa manager fails, but that's what Lambert has done. The run of form we're on is very worrying, with just two wins and seven goals in half a season. We're actually getting worse, despite the fact that there is a reasonable number of decent players here. This squad isn't going to pull up any trees, but it should be more than capable of slogging it out between 12th and 10th.

There is only one reason why its under performing so chronically.

I found your answer for a yes or no to be too simplistic, because the history of IS is more nuanced, but suffice to say, firmly rooted in Anbar province. You want to defeat IS, then you need to fight them there, the same way AQI were forced to go dormant.

The two who were executed were old AQ, not necessarily paid up members of IS, but the Iraqi women is no different a product than any number of would be human ordinance from that neck of the woods.

If that sounds dismissive, then that’s unfortunate, but ultimately these brutal executions by IS are just a sideshow in their psyops campaign, it gets people quite rightly hot under the collar, but it’s still a sideshow.

They (and when we say they, we’re talking about the leadership) were hit hard, went quiet and came back with an inkling of how to show straight, which puts them towards the top of the class in the region. I said they’re an effective army and they are, because they’re significantly better at re-supplying and manoeuvring than the Iraqi Army (but it easier when you’re pillaging from the land and not faced with a bureaucratic/corruption nightmare is the Iraqi Army is)   

 

Same people, same mission statement, just rebranded. Solution is the same as it was then, unfortunately the job was left unfinished last time when we had the chance to end it.

Doesn't that kind of suggest that the solution doesn't work?

Or at least it does work, but in order to make it work are you actually suggesting a complete genocide of everyone fighting for ISIS or that might become ISIS in future, including those that used to be AQ and the modern equivalent of the woman picked up in 2005?

In short, I think we need a different solution and yours sounds a bit too close to the final solution for my liking.

 

You're looking at the wrong problem. It wasn't the response to the insurgency post-2004, but what came after it had been crushed. Obama following an election promise is fine, but it left a weak secterian government behind who were too interested in their own patronage and filling their own pockets that a silce wasn't left for the Sunnis. A big mistake was made by not bringing in the Awakening Forces as part of the Iraqi Army. People want to get paid at the end of the day; the same people who were planting IED's for US Marines one week in 2005, were fighting alongside coalition forces the next and getting stuck into AQI.

We wasted a lot of human inteligence and good will when Iraq was abandonned. The invasion was a foolish idea, but if you are the one responsible for pulling the lid off of Pandora's Box, then you bare a responsibility to put what falls out back in.

 

Depends whether you get your kicks dancing on the head of a pin.

Not doing that at all. Just asking for some precision when debating details (as I was in the original comment).

Edit: Thanks for the nature of your post, too.

 

You were given details, which you then limited to get the answer you wanted.

The point is that IS are Anbar's finest; Al Qaeda in Iraq, They've been hit and shovelled and melted away and now they're back and don't have to worry about JSOC or the US Marines or tooled up Sunni awkening forces rocking up on their doors anytime soon.

Yes and no. The women was picked up in 2005 and the AQ chappie in 2008, when IS was running as AQ in Iraq. It goes to show the problem you face with these sorts of people; large scale assaults by US Marines, JSOC HVT raids and Awakening forces bled them white, but they didn't die and now they're back.

IS have been dropping the ball for a while now though; Kobane was a folly and attempts to try and peel off weaker players in the region like Jordan won't work by creating a nationalist fervor; men filling the streets shouting death to Deash isn't what they had in mind.

Indeed, Fire is something that No One Other than Allah may use for Punishment.” [al-Bukhârî]

IS are clearly blasphemers and a Jihad should be called for their destruction.

He seems like a confused chap on that video.

No, we had the full 3300.

I can't see them bringing 6,000. They only brought 1800 the other week,

If we got 21k for Blackpool, when there was barely more than 1200 Blackpool fans, then I fully expect that  with all the day tripping Bournemouth fans jumping on a bandwagon, that we will end up with more than the We Hate Villa More Than You derby.

Cheers. I really liked BF3, so I will pick this one up.

Worth picking up on the PS4? Are there still plenty of players online to make it worthwhile?

Agreed, although it was more of a problem at the start when I didn't know what was going on.

I am liking it, but then I did enjoy Far Cry 3 and its mechanics are the same. Its a very pretty game though.

I wouldn't say that anybody suggesting the majority of Muslims support Islamic Extremism is barking up the right tree. However, there is a sizeable minority.

3% of Egyptians support ISIS, which doesn't sound like too many, until you realise that equates to 1.5 million people, which is a worrying amount. 5% of Saudi's is over half a million.

That's enough people to cause one or two headaches.

I was there in 68. Villa fans then were not prepared to sit idly by and do nothing . We chanted" the board must go" at every game. We held demonstrations and held meetings, a big one at Digbeth civic hall. We all  loved our club too much to watch it die a slow death. From those actions, change was initiated. We suffered set backs, but the seeds of a better club were planted. Doing nothing, will change nothing. Were Villa fans then, a tougher bunch, maybe they were, but this club is drifting, much as it was back then. An inept board, an uninspiring manager, a group of players, some of which are not fit to play for the club. There are those who believe that doing nowt, except turning up, not rocking the boat, and meekly accepting our fate. is supporting the club. We ALL support the club, its just that some of us are prepared to actively defend its future. The embers from 68 are still smouldering in my belly. Time to fan the flames again I think.

Aston Villa wasn't going for somehwere between £150-200 million in 1968. The game has changed, massively.

Nothing will change till Lerner goes and Lerner isn't going anywhere for a long time. There aren't people willing to spend the best part of a quarter of a billion on a football club and then some to get us competing at the top again.

As frustrating as it is to watch, and it was like pulling teeth at Leicester, you may as well save your breath, because its only being wasted.

The front cover of the latest issue has Mohammed holding a sign saying Je Suis Charlie, with all is forgiven written above.