praisedmambo

Lambert wants him but the deal isn't completed as yet. It is still in the process of trying to get done rather than being complete. Hope he does sign whole club needs a lift. Just saying I wouldn't take it for granted as it might still be the case no-one arrives.

I say this sounds like someone caught out. Why wouldn't you say that straight off? Classic ITK vague melding of the known facts.

Happy that he's the right type of player. I think we could get another 1 or 2 in tomorrow

Any more news on Dale Stephens?

Lambert's transfers policy has played a part in this record breaking shit season. I think it's fair enough to not be jumping for joy at another young player.

Hopefully he's a Benteke and not a Bennett.

Also for the low fee and I guess low wages why has it taken this long to sign him?

Boring (way to go not taking in any previous facts yadda yadda). Can you stop repeating yourself by any chance?

Sylla is hardly someone to get the juices flowing and seems a bit of a wasted signing. Very young and inexperienced at professional level and doesn't sound like someone who is going to slot straight in and do a job so the complete opposite to what we actually need.

Are you basing your info on wikipedia by any chance? (because it's wrong - about two seasons out of date)

Far too late in the day for me,  hope not but I think the damage is already done

Why? If we actually start getting points again there's no reason why we can't stay up. 

i dont think one person is saying bent is like messi apart from you?

 

last night first half bent was the best villa player by a country mile, benteke looked shit

 

second half lambert swaps the team around tactically but then takes off the one player who can thrive on that formation

 

nzog should have come off for gabby at half time but bent should have stayed on as he was the sharpest forward and looked up for it but yet again clueless lambert takes him off and will again claim he cant play benteke and bent together up front.

 

he cant if he keeps playing shit formations and shit tactics, you may as well have no one up front with those shit tactics

 

slagging off bents performance last night  when he was the best player shows how unbalanced your opinion is of him, if he had played shit or worse than the rest fair enough

Bent was the best player? 

Funny I remember two years ago refreshing this website for the opposite information, Bent signing. 

Awful, lightweight, skinny little runt who thinks hes the Scottish Iniesta.

 

**** off

I do think people go a bit extreme. You can't blame Bannan for that result. 

(But he should never be allowed to float a ball in again from a set-piece) 

Hey, Bannan was good in the second half. I think he has been very very bad recently and a big weak link but second half he did nothing wrong. At least this game should put an end to the wingback system. 

Er, including those shitty cup games our recent form is better than Newcastle's. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21227938

Just close the thread and be done with it

 

i'm absolutely stunned that we haven't entered the market this January and Randy/Lambert are all but confirming relegation

 

i'm aware there is a few days left but who the **** are we kidding

 

there's more activity in Cliff Richard's underpants than in Lambert's office

 

unbelievable

There's also not much activity in the transfer window at all, never mind our club. Unbelievable? Why is it unbelievable? It's a famously tough window. 

So where's the bid for Danny Graham if were 'trying' to sign players. He wants to leave Swansea, interest from Sunderland and Norwich. If we can't out bid these we really are in the shit

Why do we need a striker and is that the same Sunderland we can't outbid who paid 12 million on Adam Johnson and 12 million on Fletcher this summer?

It seems to me that there are two different messages coming out. PL saying there isn't money and RL saying there is money for PL for transfers. I'm confused as to what is going on. Anyone else remember a week or so ago when Villa said that there was money to spend and PL will be backed. They let all the papers know and now they changed their mind again? Seems a bit weird to me

He never says "there is no money" outright though. It's more "there's not lots of money" or "there's no money for players like Bent" or something even more abstract. I might just be hoping. I think quite often, like when he ruled out Lescott, it is about the wages as much as anything. 

Delph was bought into the conversation because he is part of our midfield, and I was speculating that Lambert may have thought that he would add some quality and steel to our midfield and therefore didn't think he needed to buy any more midfielders. Delph has been incosistant in his Villa career partly due to injuries and a lack of a decent run, so it was going to be risky to rely on him to come good. We have plenty of average midfielders in the squad, and some quality additions in the summer would have been appreciated.

 

I do not think anyone thinks that he has finished his overhaul yet, and that is fine, as nobody could expect him to completely rebuild the squad just yet. What concerns me is that after some heavy defeats Lambert hasn't made us hard to beat and well organised, we constantly make errors and gift goals to the opposition. The first thing that a good manager does is organise his players and drill them in the basics, and for whatever reason we seem to be repeating our errors most weeks. I would love Lambert to prove us doubters wrong, but since the Chelsea beating he doesn't appear to have had any success in rebuilding the teams confidence or reorganising them. Although I wouldn't be happy, I could take the Chelsea beating as a one off as under MON, but to follow that up with the Spurs/Wigan/Soton/Bradford games has knocked all of my belief in Lambert out of me. A decent manager would have got a response after that Chelsea game, and it would have been a one off, not a trend.

 

It feels like the Christmas run has left us as an unattractive prospect to most players, which is probably why we haven't got anyone in sooner. This is sad, because prior to the Chelsea game we did start to show a bit of promise. I would think that any quality players we are looking at are biding their time to see if better options become available to them.

I just think we've got too many players who aren't good enough, and you can't teach people to have more talent. (That's players from the academy, squad pre-summer I'm thinking of.)

dudevillaisnice, on 28 Jan 2013 - 10:44, said:

Even getting one midfielder in wasn't enough.. KEA wasn't the answer and Delph certainly wasn't either (just look at his injury record).

 

Poor judgement either way, it's worrying how weak our midfield has looked for years and still nothing is done about it yet, I think we've had more full backs than midfielders in the past few years which is shocking

 

Yep, you would have thought that if we could see it, then surely someone who is a supposed professional would see it. Even with Petrov fit and in the team in past seasons we looked like we need someone else to cover him, losing Petrov has been a massive blow, but he was getting to the twilight of his career and we should have been looking at longer term options anyway. Massive oversight imo. The midfield is the most important part of them team as they decide whether you are controlling things or being over run.

 

.

KEA wasn't the answer in hindsight. It hasn't worked out but I think there is an example of Lambert trying to address the issue we all knew we had. I think he was meant to be the answer. He never bought Delph, so I'm not sure what that was about. The job is still going on. Do you think that Lambert has completed the overhaul of the squad that he intended? We know Dale Stephens was in the pipeline too, whatever happened there. There are still players on the wagebill who need to go and more signings in their place before his squad building can be fully appraised I think. Work in progress. Things take time etc. 

They do. He had to lower the wagebill and form a squad - it's a difficult job on 20 million (that's after losing Petrov, Collins, Cuellar, Heskey, probably someone else, from an already shit team, who - except Heskey - would all have played significant roles so far this season - but they had to go, we had to lower the wage bill). We're short of players as it is and that's after signing 7/8 in the window.

Agreed 'omariqy' there's absolutely nothing positive about the club at the moment but if we had signed Sissoko (especially with Warnock's and Hutton's wages possibly off the wage bill) it would have given everyone a much needed lift. 

There's a key part to this supposition that I think was in the managers intentions and the failure of anyone being stupid enough to buy them might just have dictated the number of signings we made. Maybe it, even now, stopped us going for Sissoko. His remit is to reduce the wage bill though, so his hands were tied. You can use all the if's in the world but KEA was/is a DM - some signings don't work out, and that one is a shame considering how he looked at the start of the season. I hope his bit of sunshine in Africa maybe has given a kick up the ass because I think him and Westwood and N'Zogbia are the best three in the squad for midfield. Also, there is no way KEA is on the wages that Sissoko is on, which is not Lambert's fault if he is having to work to a budget. 

And for me Lambert has to take a lot of the blame for this.

It's all well and good talking about a vision, a plan and how wage restrictions haven't helped but as the manager he has made mistakes that have lead to this.

"It's all good and well these valid points but I'm going to completely ignore them."

Too right. When are Faulkner & Lerner leaving?

To be honest, I have avoided pointing the finger at someone to blame, but if it goes anywhere it's between those two. Lerner has made some naive decisions. 

Sorry how has he not made it worse?

He was under big restrictions during the summer and he didn't make smart choices. Lerner made his job hard, no doubt about that but lambert did himself no favours.

Yes and like others has said there are other examples of managers doing well for a short period and then dropping big time.

Why is lambert any different? If he was so special we wouldn't look so awful.

The mandate for any manager coming in was to reduce the wage bill. That means many players have gone and we have had to replace them with younger, hungry, players. That is totally sensible way to approach those financial restrictions. With those restrictions what else could he or any other manager have done? What other approach would give us even a chance of sorting all this mess out?

We were always going to have a weaker squad. It's a transition period anyway. And face it, we're not that much worse than last year, and to think two years ago with Downing Young and lots of experienced players we were in the relegation zone outright at this stage, your principle accusation that HE made the squad worse is short sighted for so many reasons. You ignore all the facts surrounding what he is having to do in the job and how the club have been since MON left. You are also ignoring the fact that his approach was always going to take time to come to full fruition, and requires stability. It is a job very much started and the process is only in the beginning. 

So you may ask yourself why did he ever come here. Cause im sure its not to sit at the bottom of the table under immense pressure. Its to big for him, always was!!!

At least he's trying to sort out the problems. He doesn't look like he's running away either. I don't think it's too big for him at all. 

"Too big for him!?" What does that even mean, come on man. It's dumb rhetoric. 

And there we have it, the 'STOP' to all those who keep spouting that Lambert lost a lot of players from last season as if it were some sort of defence for the bloke's incompetence.

 

If he really wanted to I am sure he could have kept Cuellar and Collins and Warnock and Hutton are still here he just chooses not to use them.

 

The fact is that the squad Lambert now has is entirely of his own making and nothing to do with any 'Bleeding Heart' loss of players!

He had one window. We are cutting wages aren't we? So why offer Cuellar a new contract? Lowton is not worse than Hutton. Your sarcasm covers a lack of thought, I'm sorry. We were so shit last year too, don't forget that. The squad is absolutely not of his own making...it is full of inherited players, academy players, and also players overpaid and underperforming we can't shift, you know that. So why ignore it?

Last year vs this year comparisons. (Last year is obviously the full season, this year the half season we have had) Appearances:

I've included players who played quite a few games last season who have left, which is obviously fair.

 

       last season vs. this season

Lichaj...9 vs 10 (whole season vs half season!)

Petrov 28 vs 0

Baker 8 vs 11

Dunne 28 vs 0

Collins 32 vs 0

Heskey 28 vs 0

Clark 15 vs 20

I can't get stats for Cuellar or Delph. 

 

My point is to BJ10, he didn't take the same squad and make it worse. The players that left we all believed had to go. Lambert only had 20million to sort out a squad that was shit the season before, with significant players missing (Petrov, Dunne maybe). 

I pointed this out because we are relying on completely different players this season (Lichaj, Clark, Baker, Bannan, Delph) who have all made a significant number of appearances this season, compared to last season, what's more, I'm pretty sure if Lambert got the opportunity to replace them with more balanced players he would. 

No it's even worse. Who's fault is that?

If you want to blame the financial restrictions then it is Lerner not Lambert. 

We keep hearing "Get the wage bill down", what chance did he have? What choice did he have?

We have a talented manager working under tough conditions with a shit and limited squad. 

Last year vs this year comparisons. (Last year is obviously the full season, this year the half season we have had) Appearances:

I've included players who played quite a few games last season who have left, which is obviously fair.

       last season vs. this season

Lichaj...9 vs 10 (whole season vs half season!)

Petrov 28 vs 0

Baker 8 vs 11

Dunne 28 vs 0

Collins 32 vs 0

Heskey 28 vs 0

Clark 15 vs 20

I can't get stats for Cuellar or Delph. 

My point is to BJ10, he didn't take the same squad and make it worse. The players that left we all believed had to go. Lambert only had 20million to sort out a squad that was shit the season before, with significant players missing (Petrov, Dunne maybe).