Super-Villan

And it wasn't a bottomless wallet. He was given a decent amount of money to get us to pretty much where he did, 6th.

Sorensen is meh, Barry only developed into a proper player under MON, Baros was shite, Angel was hardly a world beater, Cahill was young and hardly an asset, Whittingham ended up in the Championship. It really wasn't a strong squad at all, it was a lower mid-table squad.

MON started from a much lower base, with O'Leary's woeful team, and he had no preseason. McLeish started with a team of decent enough players that had underperformed under Houllier (and that was still decent after getting rid of Ash and Downing).

I really don't think that's the case at all. Previous clubs do not carry on paying players a wage after they have tranfered away. When they are on loan, yes. I'm not even sure it would be allowed to pay the wages of a player you didn't own - I strongly suspect it would contrevene fair play rules. What can happen is that a bulk sum is paid when a player leaves for lower wages, so Ireland could have been paid enough to cover an additional £20k a week for the remainder of his contract. But unless someone has any decent evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty sure that they can't be still paying any of his wages directly. He still gets 20k from man city.he didn't want to come to villa and demanded money to move. man city really wanted milner and agreed to the deal. man city will pay him the extra 20k until the date his man city contract would have run out had he not left them. its basically a compensation agreement for being forced out of the door and it is perfectly legal. Bent is on the same money overall as he has a clause in his contract to say that he has to ne on a par with the highest earner which was Ireland even though part of his money comes from man city. I think you're wrong. It wouldn't be allowed, as to be paid weekly like that he'd have to be an employee. If they were paying him every week there would be a conflict of interest whenever we played Man City. I think you've misunderstood the situation. The compensation for agreeing to come here is correct, but it would have been paid in a lump sum to him on leaving Man City.

I really don't think that's the case at all. Previous clubs do not carry on paying players a wage after they have tranfered away. When they are on loan, yes. I'm not even sure it would be allowed to pay the wages of a player you didn't own - I strongly suspect it would contrevene fair play rules. What can happen is that a bulk sum is paid when a player leaves for lower wages, so Ireland could have been paid enough to cover an additional £20k a week for the remainder of his contract. But unless someone has any decent evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty sure that they can't be still paying any of his wages directly.

That's not realistic though, and very few managers (if any) would accept that, so you'd severely limit the field of candidates.

Teams don't sell players and then continue to pay their wages, no.

I believe it's possible. Like I say, my hunch would be that McLeish will stay. Nobody can say 100% that he will be staying at this stage. You can 100% believe he will stay, but it is no 100% nailed on to happen.

I agree that it is very likely that McLeish will be here beyond the end of this season, but it is by no means a cold hard fact. Many managers have signed players and then ended up going anyway. What are Lerner/Faulkner supposed to do if Randy comes to them with the chance of signing some guy from Holland on a Bosman? Say,No Alex, we're still trying to work out if you've got a job in the summer'. No, right now they have to back him. And they've probably reasoned that even if they do sack McLeish, and even if the new manager didn't want Holman, they could probably make a bit of money back on him anyway.

Yeah, and when Ireland finally did start playing well he got dropped. The only reason he's featuring now is because Keane's gone. Well you can't sign a player on a months loan and not play him. It's one of the reasons I was against the Keane signing at the time. Ireland was playing well and I thought disrupting that for a player who was only going to be here a very short time was not the best way to go about things.

I think many Villa fans had the expectation that we would get relegated because of McLeish, not regardless of him. Anyone who thinks simply avoiding relegation is something to be proud of with our current squad...wel, I'd strongly disagree with them. And I doubt there are many at all.

so we were winning games right ,left and centre before he arrived ? Huh? I said nothing about winning games. Mantis said, "TRO, there's absolutely no excuses for setting the team up so negatively. That is the biggest issue." You said you didn't believe that was the case, and my post was a response to that.

It's just a coincidence that we are set up in a similar way to McLeish's previous side and play negative football in a very similar way then.

I was open to the idea of selling Bent...if we then used that money to buy another striker and strengthen other areas. Just doing without him and having nobody else in his place? Hell no.

I think relegation could be a blessing in disguise. But it's no sure fire thing, and plenty of giants have been put to sleep in previous seasons after initially thinking the same. So I'd rather take the safer option of staying in the Prem, thanks.

With the amount of money he's spent, what he's doing with Arsenal is still pretty incredible. His problem is that it just isn't quite as incredible as what he was able to achieve at first, and he's paying the price for those raised expectations. I think Arsenal would suffer if they lost him, certainly.

I voted Lerner. And I'm not a huge fan of Lerner at all.

The key, simple as it sounds, is to pick up points quickly. Win at Wigan and that's a massive 3 points. Lose and not only do we look in more danger mathematically, but morale drops and the next match is even more difficult still, especially against a Blackburn side who have decent attacking instincts when they are in the mood. Lose that as well and you're piling pressure on pressure, more articles being written about our plight, protests, abuse for Eck, player morale shot...it starts to look more and more difficult to see where each point is coming from. That's how 'big' clubs get sucked into relegation battles.

But McDonald is too busy trying to catch Hamburglar, although if he does become available then he'd probably do a better job than his fellow clown McLeish. He can have the extra 'a' back in his name once he's proved himself.

As I just said elsewhere, I would put McDonald in charge now until the end of the season, with Cowans as his assistant, then I'd assess where we were in the summer. It would give us more time to assess the cheap option of McDonald, and also more time to put a plan into place about who else we might get. But to be honest, even someone as far down my list as Curbishley is looking attractive right now.

I voted no. I would install McDonald as caretaker, with Cowans, until the end of the season, and then assess where we were again then.

The MON comparisons are daft in the extreme. MON inherited a poor team near the bottom and had no preseason but was making progress in the right direction. We were moving up. McLeish had a decent preseason, the chance to bring his own players in, and a squad that finished 9th (and even though we were lucky to do so, the quality of the squad itself was at least top 8 in my opinion), and he is taking us in exactly the oppsosite direction, right down. It's all about context, not numbers on a sheet of paper.

This idea that we keep losing because of stupid individual defensive mistakes, but that this isn't in any way the fault of the manager. That's pretty funny.

But everyone might not choose to believe him. He might want to say that in order to keep what he sees as an internal disciplinary matter in-house, for example. And he might want to quash a story before it turned into some much bigger player revolt thing (as was starting to happen).

I think Ireland played well first half and we missed him a lot in the second. Bannan seems to have gone backwards since the drink drive thing and is having an Albrighton kind of season. I still have hope that both can come back stronger, but I wouldn't put my house on it.