villadodo

Purslow, Smith and Suso will be lucky if they get a chance to eat or sleep this summer! Don't think I've ever seen such a massive rebuilding job required for a promoted team. If the season started tomorrow our team would look something like this. Steer Guilbert - Chester - Bree - Taylor McGinn - Hourihane - Grealish Elmohamady - Kodjia - Green Subs: Kalinic, Lansbury, Bjarnason, Gardner, Davis, Hogan, O'Hare. A lot of those players are average even for the Championship. Then considering that Gardner, Bjarnason and Hogan will almost certainly be sold. Kalinic, Nyland, Lansbury, Chester, Kodjia, Taylor and Elmo could also leave. Green, O'Hare, Davis and Bree could be loaned out. I know some of the loan players are likely to return but contracts and transfer fees still need to be negotiated. Its going to be an exciting summer for us but a stressful one for the transfer committee! I fully trust them to pull it out of the bag but if we do manage to stay up next season they deserve great credit.

Imagine if it was another case of mistaken identity like the Fer / Carroll transfer and we were actually doing a player plus cash deal for Che Adams! Blues fans would be rioting.

Some good comments here overall. I expect a lot more of these sort of signings. As it stands we are well short of squad depth. What happens if we buy 4 players for £25m each and they all get injured within 3 weeks of the season starting? We are screwed. He is much cheaper than the likes of Joe Lolley who has just come off the back of an outstanding season. However both are about the same age and when you look at their whole of career stats Jota is much more impressive. Presumably Smith likes his character and he's undervalued at the moment. Then we can bring in another winger and have some competition.

Completely 100% agree. I think Smith, Suso and Purslow have decided we've got too many youngsters who are never going to make it hanging around the youth team until 22-23 years old blocking spaces that could be taken by younger more talented players and they have decided to have a clear out. The youngsters worth their salt should be playing u23 football when they are 17/18, on loan to league one or two when they are 19/20 and around the first team squad by latest 22. Yes technically its the u23 league but how many top players are still playing at that level at that age? Its the same thing with Suliman captaining the England u19s. How many top drawer 19 year olds even play at that level? The answer is they don't they are already playing u21 or even full England squad. Lyden should have been released years ago. It reminds me of when we kept Chris Herd until he was 25 despite hardly playing a first team game. We finally let him go and now he plays in India after unsuccessful spells in Australia and Thailand! The only slight surprise for me would be Mitch Clark. We are short of left backs, he is only 20 and he has managed to hold down a first team place at Port Vale. However that doesn't mean he can make the step up to the Championship or fit into our style of play. His loan spell had a couple of decent reports in the Birmingham Mail which I'm presuming is why some people are disappointed to see him released. However I'm pretty sure Smith, Suso and the scouting network have had a good look at him and decided he just doesn't fit into our long term plans.

So there has been a lot of negativity since results in the week. Yes we dropped into the bottom half. Yes we are further behind Birmingham. Yes we have dropped below Steve Bruce's new team. Its a blow for the ego. However Derby and Bristol City both lost so in terms of our chance of making the play offs things could not have gone any better. If we beat Derby this weekend and Bristol City lose to Preston we will only be 5 points off the play offs. Derby are out of form and we have Grealish back. Other teams still have a game in hand but Tuanzebe should be back from injury soon and there is still enough games to turn things around.

Grealish and Tuanzebe have missed substantial parts of the season. McGinn, Davis, Kalinic, Nyland and Lansbury are currently unavailable. Taylor, Jedinak, Hutton, Bjarnason, Elmo, Elphick, Hogan, Adomah and the majority of the rest of the first team squad had all been written off as not being good enough by majority of fans even before Dean Smith arrived. Of our youngsters O'Hare, RHM and Doyle-Hayes have not exactly set League 2 on fire. That is not knocking them but illustrating they are not ready to walk into the first team. Ramsey meanwhile has been promoted by Smith. He might be an exceptional 17 year old but I doubt all of the academy teenagers are ready for the Championship. My point is with the players we have available that currently we have a mid table Championship or possibly a bottom half Championship squad. I am not shocked that the performances have reflected that. The head coach Dean Smith is simply a cog in a bigger machine. If the board, the players, recruitment and other coaches were shit even Guardiola would struggle. On the whole I think majority of posts have been positive and patient. For those who are not happy I understand the frustration at paying good money to watch shit football week in week out. What I would ask you is how exactly can Dean Smith do any better with the resources at his disposal? Who exactly is this miracle worker you would replace him with? Fortunately everything I've read and heard from Purslow and the board encourages me that they have a strategy and will put things in place behind the scenes to get things right. I do not believe anything would push them to sack Smith this season. I think next season once the dead wood has been moved on we will really start to see what Smith is about. The year after that I believe he will take us back to the Premier League.

I'm happy to see us going for young, undervalued players instead of 30 year old former PL journeymen on big wages. My main concern would be the ability of our scouting department to identify decent players. Yes Smith had a lot of success with this at Brentford but by all accounts he was just head coach and their recruitment was responsible for finding a number of gems both before and during his tenure. The last time we tried something similar our scouting department was responsible for the likes of Tonev, Helenius, Crespo, Okore, Luna and Bacuna! As far as I'm aware we've not had wholesale changes in the recruitment area since those days?

Mourinho's assistants have not had the best track record have they? Karanka? AVB? Steve Clarke? Would be quite underwhelmed by this to be honest.

My managerial dream team would be Dean Smith with Olof Mellberg as assistant!

I really hope we go for Smith, Fonseca or someone of that ilk. Someone who is renowned for exciting football, getting the best out of players but also has a track record of success. If we get Henry or Terry I would be mortified as they have no experience and we are literally taking a huge punt based on their playing career. I also think the fans need a breath of fresh air after 2 years of Bruce and I don't think someone like Allardyce will deliver that regardless of whether they get us more organised. There have also been a lot of names thrown around who have a foreign name but a very mixed record e.g. Sanchez Flores, AVB, Garcia. I hope if we do get a foreign coach it is for the right reasons as we all remember what happened with Remi Garde. People keep saying Smith has only been successful because he has a big team around him who are great coaches in their respective areas. Well surely that's what we should be trying to replicate anyway rather than just getting a manager and saying here you run everything. I don't think any manager would thrive under those conditions.

The new owners are trying to put their structure in place before changing manager. Bruce isn't their long term solution. They gave him a chance and it hasn't worked out but it is not ideal to sack him now. They need to get their director of football in place first as he will be running the football side and will have a big say in what style of manager we recruit. There is no point making a rushed appointment and finding out the DOF and manager are on two completely different pages. I am sure the next manager will be more of a coach and less involved in the recruitment side. This is what the new owners mean by stability as the coach can be replaced without having to completely overhaul the ethos of the club. I feel we will be heading more down the Watford, Wolves and Brentford model and not the approach we have been used to from Xia and Lerner. All this being said I feel Bruce is causing a bit of a headache to the new owners and Purslow as there is no use being out of sight of promotion when the new man comes in. I think we are getting close to requiring an interim solution.

Probably just as well FFP exists. If not Dr Tony might have decided we could afford an even bigger wage bill!

I'm of the opinion Xia doesn't have any money and all those warnings and Fit and Proper investigation at the start should have been heeded. No one knows what he actually does. Supposedly he went to Harvard University but on Twitter he can hardly speak English? He's gambled on getting us to the Premier League so he could sell the club on at a massive profit. If this ends up with the club having to sell the stadium or training ground it will be a disaster.

This club needs to start being managed properly and I'm not talking about Bruce. When Lerner came in he threw money around recklessly to try and break into the Champions League and crippled us financially for the next 6 years. Tony has come into the club and thrown money around recklessly to try and get us promoted straight away and now from the sounds of it we are screwed for next season. Yes its media speculation but how often are all the newspapers wrong about the same thing. I know we all wanted to hear it when he came in but saying we were going to be the best team in the world within 5 years was naïve. Man Utd, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich. These are the biggest teams in the world. They have a global fanbase and they make more money from their official pot noodle partners than we do from our shirt sponsor. Spurs have been brilliantly managed since both us and them were trying to break into the Champions League 10 years ago. They have only just started to bridge the gap. To think we would achieve that in 5 years from a starting point in the Championship was ludicrous. The parachute payments were there to cushion the blow of dropping into the Championship and allow the club to steadily bring down the wage bill and rebuild a squad for this level. Instead we've blown a fortune in transfer fees and wages in a desperate gamble on getting promoted. Excluding the likes of Man City and Chelsea with their unlimited money and clubs with a massive fanbase like Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool. The teams overachieving at the moment Brighton, Bournemouth, Huddersfield, Fulham, Cardiff, Spurs and Burnley all seem to me to have sensibly built their teams within their means. The likes of West Ham and Everton have wasted a fortune and aren't getting anywhere for it. I'm saying now expectations need to be reset. We have a big stadium and fanbase. That should be a good financial advantage in this league but someone needs to start realising we can only live within our means.

I'm just going to let the stats do the talking here. Championship games Westwood has started... Played 15 Won 2 Drawn 8 Lost 5 Points 14 Points per game 0.93 Championship games Westwood hasn't started... Played 6 Won 4 Drawn 2 Lost 0 Points 14 Points per game 2.33 This is not even taking into account that we scored an equaliser after he came off in the 85th minute against Newcastle. And that we let conceded an equaliser after he came on against Barnsley. Based on points per game if we had played all 21 games without Westwood we would be top of the table (48.93 points). If we played every game with Westwood we would be in the relegation zone (18.93) points.

Playing with 10 men when he's on the pitch and has been that way for the best part of the last 5 years. Nothing but pass the ball sideways. Run away from the play. Doesn't mark his man just lets them run away from him and points for someone else to chase them. No coincidence we've won since Bruce dropped him. I can understand the booing. So many managers have continued to pick him how else are the fans supposed to get their point across. He is not good enough. At the same time I do have sympathy for him it can't be pleasant knowing your so unpopular. He doesn't seem like a bad guy he is just not very good at football. Would be best for everyone if he left in January but I can't see why anyone would buy him. Especially on PL wages. As for the guy quoting Sherwood, Lambert and Adrian Durham. Those are two of the least successful managers in Villa history both of whom loved Westwood and were subsequently sacked for their poor results (which Westwood played a part in). The other is a journalist with no more insight than the average fan who is no doubt basing his opinions on hearsay and a limited number of Villa games he's actually watched. I would certainly trust my own eyes as well as the opinions of other Villa fans who watch our games week in week out ahead of Adrian Durham.