briny_ear

This is just getting silly now. You have no way of proving that the improvement in performance was BECAUSE of Carew's absence. Nor that we wouldn't have performed even better if he had remained fit and a regular member of the side. As "Thug" has said, you can "prove" anything with statistics. What you're not doing in this thread is telling us anything interesting about the real world.

I see only 13% of people so far have got the right answer of - 3rd.

Can't really see the point of spending so much time discussing JPA with all the exceitement there is going on at Villa Park at the moment...

The fact that we have done well without Carew shows that the entire squad deserves credit for carrying on without a key player. We have also played successfully without others such as Bouma and Laursen. Good news, but these statistics cannot be used to support an argument that we "don't miss" any particular player. It is absiurd to think we "don't miss" a player as good as Carew.

Interesting to see how much regard there was for Downing amongst Villatalkers in those days, also how many of the 2005 posters have red cards! I reckon Barry has made better progress over those 3-4 years than young Stewart...

I love the "other - please specify" button. Exactly how are you supposed to do that? :winkold:

Apart from when he's on the treatment bench, which is usually.

Hmm. The same number as John Gregory! But remember this was just after his first season before it all began to fall apart. I think (mostly) we all loved him that season.

Reading that thread from 2004 has just given me a panic attack.

General Can I add my concern about the bad publicity about the Poppy Day collection. The club obviously has a really good story to tell but the quote from the AVFC press office that was used in the News Of The World article didn't really explain things properly (“We are having a collection for Acorns at the Middlesbrough game and don’t want to bombard our fans with a number of collections,”). The newspaper also had negative quotes from Matt Croucher, who is a local lad and a war hero who is just about to be awarded the George Cross for bravery in Afghanistan, and Patrick Mercer MP, who is the Conservative Party spokesman for homeland security and a very big supporter of the Armed Forces in his political work. I appreciate that the club doesn't want to be seen to be boasting about its charity work but I do wonder if it would be worth trying to set the record straight on this one, possibly even by trying to involve Patrick Mercer in the work we are doing with the Armed Forces, and to get some positive publicity for that. This may all blow over and be forgotten but I worry that, once a rag like the News of the World gets onto a story like this, it won't let go for a while.

^^^The word "curmudgeon" comes to mind...

I certainly would have picked Milner over Bentley, mainly because we know what we are getting with Milner and have even had a chance to see him in action in an earlier stage of his development - when he was bloody good and worked really hard. I think the jury is still just a little bit out on whether Bentley is going to show that consistent hard work and commitment to match his skills.

I think my position is I would be very unhappy if he stayed, for a number of reasons. However, it is looking increasingly likely that he will be with Villa next season, and feeling pretty humiliated by the way he has been cast off by Liverpool having plonked all his eggs in their basket, so we are going to have to get used to managing the non-departure of Barry as one of the issues for the manager and club to handle. How well we manage all that may well have a big impact on our overall performance.

I have been thinking about the - apparently now annual - Cristiano Ronaldo saga where he says he is desperate to leave Man U, Sir Alex catches up with him and has a word, then he says he's delighted to stay and gives 100%+ for Man U in the next season. So wanting to leave a club doesn't necessarily mean you can't give a committed performance for that club. The difference is that Barry is older and should be wiser. He hasn't said he would be more than happy to stay at Villa - the idea of staying has now been mentioned as a further raising of the stakes with Liverpool, to try to force them to take him. As things stand, there is nothing to suggest he wouldn't launch another escape attempt at the earliest opportunity. I think there would need to be a major change of attitude on Barry's behalf, one that really carries conviction, for me to want him to stay. And so far it just isn't happening.

Carson vs Friedel = 2008/9 better.

Right, count me in the "don't get it" group as well. :? BTW it's now 50.93% No to 49.07% Yes but still showing 50-49. How do they do that?

Lol, the "happy" ones have just edged ahead by 3 votes. Could this be linked to the fact that it is just after lunchtime?

Having been a Villa fan since 1961, and so having seen the fans' boycott of the late sixties, the slump to the old Division 3 in the early seventies, but also the climb back to the glory days of the early eighties, I have no hesitation in voting "yes". In my list of low points for Villa over the years, the end of the O'Leary/Ellis era, with its almost complete loss of direction, players' letters, etc., actually features quite high - probably as bad as the late sixties problems.. The renewal of enthusiasm, optimism, and skillful, attacking football since Lerner/MON came on the scene has been exceptional. Last season we saw glimpses of the sort of exciting and successful football that MON will bring to Villa if he is given time to do his job and build up the squad as he wants. Just get off his back and let him get on with it. Don't forget we need him more than he needs us.

Let's hope Man C get them, then

What IS it about Villa players called Gareth?

The regulations on registration are probably more complex than the EU Treaty but teams have several bites of the cherry. Players have to be registered by midnight on 24 July for the 2nd qualifying round, 7 August for the third qualifying round and 1 September for all further matches from the first match in the group stage up to and including the final. There is more to it for that but those are the key dates for the fat waiter and his crack team to keep in mind over the summer.

You should be even more worried if the bloke who phones up has a broad Madrid accent and there is the sound of two middle-aged American men in the background squabbling over money... While we are on the subject of Rafa, I couldn't help but smile at the Google cache for his Wikipedia entry as of 23 Jul 2008 08:39:29 GMT. It's been cleaned up now but at that point it started Naughty, naughty...

The main article and some of the responses are very interesting. However, the idea that in general Villa fans are starting to get twitchy and are losing faith in the new regime does seem a bit at odds with the news that season ticket sales are at higher levels than last season. That suggests an increase in confidence, and I think an article claiming to detect a general trend of opinion amongst Villa fans needs to explain this seeming contradiction. I was particularly struck at the suggestion (threat?) that, if MON doesn't produce more magic this season, fans will start protesting and bringing out banners. This reminded me of the events in the third year of Alex Ferguson's managership at Man U, when the fans unfurled a banner at the end of the season saying: "Three years of excuses and it's still crap. Ta ra Fergie." Fans are by their nature impatient and have a simplistic view of what is needed to make their team successful - buy us the best players, play fantastic football and win lots of trophies and titles. Simple. When it doesn't happen, as, sadly, for most clubs it won't, they start to complain and the club's owners then have a choice. It is easy to sack the manager and get a new one in - ideally, a popular former player, as Newcastle did with Keegan. But, as the Ferguson example shows, fans are not necessarily very good at judging the worth of a manager,and the other choice is for clubs to back their own judgement and stick with their manager through periods of unpopularity as teams like Man U and Everton (and in a different way Arsenal - though Wenger is never criticised by the fans) have notably done. Those few clubs are rare in their approach to supporting the manager and, as ChrisVillan says, it remains to be seen whether Randy Lerner will support MON through times of unpopularity with the fans. So many clubs go for the option of switching managers frequently - Spurs, Man C, West Ham (and, in a former era, one deadly Doug) for example - without obvious success. But it is an easy way to appease the fans. I would like to think that the regime at Villa is not so weak and that they will continue on the course they have set and create enough stability to enable us to build consistently season by season to a position where we can challenge the top teams. But nothing is predictable in football and I certainly wouldn't bet on it. What I would bet on is that Villa fans will get impatient and call for MON's sacking. He must know that and Randy Lerner probably does. If Villa fans were to succeed in getting MON sacked, it would in my opinion count as a fairly spectacular foot-shooting operation.

Ummm... Because Friedel is a better goalkeeper than Robinson?