tom_avfc

When you say "all we had to do" was replace Grealish I think you're underestimating the difficulty of doing this for a team in our position. We lost one of the top performers in the league and were never going to be able to replace him with one player like for like. As it is I think the only thing that I agree with in your analysis is that signing Ings was a bit of an odd move. Yes, we needed another striker but given the season that Watkins had last year I'm not convinced we needed to spend the money we did on Danny Ings. However, the rest of what you've put I don't agree with. You need four centre backs to get through a season playing 4 at the back so we signed Tuanzebe as back up. Buendia and Bailey don't strike me as players that are purely right wingers and I don't see much issue with their signings. In reality we've been hampered by a load of injuries meaning we've had to play a 5 at the back for large parts of the season. When we do go into our preferred formation we end up with a choice between Ashley Young or one of the kids in central midfield along with players like Nakamba who would be expected to be fringe players this season purely because of the number of injuries. I think its hard to comment too much on the team shape and tactics as we have never had a chance to see Smith's first team for this season.

I heard that Mings knocked out Sanson. Douglas Luiz got involved and sparked out Jaden Philogene-Bidace. This led to a full on gang war amongst the Villa squad with Mings, Philogene-Bidace and Danny Ings carrying out regular hits on the Sanson and Douglas Luiz crew. Trezeguet also heavily involved as a bit of a traitor double crossing both sides. Either that or the players mentioned above were all either injured or ill. Seriously though these rumours are getting pretty ridiculous.

Noticeably quiet on this thread. Thought he was completely ineffective today and never looked like creating much. The comparisons to Grealish and the statements that we’re still a one man team just with Bailey instead of Grealish may have been a bit premature. I’m sure he’ll improve on today but the anointment of him as our new Messiah was a good example of the knee jerk reactions people make.

“If he does one bad pass”? He pretty much gives the ball away every time he gets it and does it in pretty dangerous positions a lot of the time. Yes, he runs around a lot and wins the ball back but when you can’t pass a ball 5 yards to a teammate it’s pretty pointless. He benefits from the Birkir Bjarnasson trait of running around like a headless chicken a lot so people think he’s having a great game. The downgrade from Douglas Luiz to Nakamba is the biggest downgrade in our squad from first team to backup other than Martinez to Jed Steer.

Yeah to play Hause ahead of Mings when both are fit is Smith’s worst decision in his time at Villa for me. We had a fantastic defensive record last season and haven’t played with our regular back four from last season once this season. I find that completely baffling.

For what it’s worth I thought it was a pretty tight match too up to the red card. They scored with two long range strikes. Their keeper made a stunning save from Watkins’ header and the red card obviously made it difficult for us. The games we’ve wasted playing the stupid 5 at the back and odd decisions such as ever starting Hause ahead of Mings when both are fit are far more of an issue for me than that overall performance today.

People seriously believe we have a top 10 squad with this guy playing as many minutes as he has this season? Also people seriously believe Newcastle would pay £15 million for him?

I guess you run the risk of picking up injuries by playing players into the ground. If bringing Nakamba on for 20 minutes means Douglas Luiz doesn’t pick up an injury that puts him out for weeks/ months then it may be better in the long run. I’m happy to trust the sports scientists and the manager with all the information available to them rather than some bloke on a forum who thinks everybody should be able to play 90 minutes every game to be honest.

I’d say he’s done well to be able to play football again whatever the level. He was very slow to get to grips with the Premier League but any chance he had of making it at Villa was unfortunately taken away by that ridiculous Ben Mee challenge.

Anybody going into the season expecting Europe was always setting themselves up for disappointment to be honest. I think there were a few interviews with players where they talked briefly about aiming for Europe. I think that's just the standard setting of high goals rather than where the club realistically thought it should be this season. As it stands we're 4/5 points off the European places. With players coming back to fitness if we can get a couple of wins on the board quickly then the mood can quickly shift.

I keep reading this about the squad being good for an 8th - 10th placed finish and I'm not really sure where it comes from. There's a genuine 5 teams that we were never going to finish above this season - Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Man City and Leicester. You then get to West Ham and Spurs who are another 2 that I would say there was next to no chance of us finishing above. Arsenal and Everton both finished above us last season also and neither lost their one outstanding player like Villa did. That's 9 teams now that I'd expect to finish above us going into the season. Wolves are an interesting one in that they fell apart last season after losing Raul Jimenez last season and if he comes back into form then they're a completely different proposition to last season. I just don't get how people are saying this squad is an 8th - 10th placed squad in this league. To me it's a squad that could finish anywhere between 9th and 13th and I'd consider that to be a decent season given that we made more money in player sales than in purchases in the summer and lost our best player in the process ( a player that is near on impossible to replace). I do think that Smith is likely to be a bit of a victim of his own success last season. Finishing 11th was well above what I'd have anticipated last season and has people dreaming of European football when in reality the squad is still a bit threadbare once we pick up an injury or two. I think we're on the right track and the demand for instant success is something that I'd have thought would have been put into perspective by the few years we spent outside the Premier League.

Feels like there’s a rumour on every thread since Friday night. Weirdly there’s then half a dozen people ready to believe anything they read also.

Why did you think “can’t see that working out” with this particular signing? As for whether he’ll be any good for us I don’t see how anybody can tell. He’s hardly played any football so to form an opinion on him is pretty difficult other than to say it would be nice if he was fit once in a while.

He got booed pretty much everywhere when he played for us. Probably comes from the number of times he’s fouled every game. Easier to blame it on him diving then to acknowledge that your defenders aren’t good enough to stop him fairly.

Agree with this. I would say that I still think a 4-3-3 would suit us more than this system that hasn’t worked for a few weeks now. However you can guarantee that had players like El Ghazi started and we’d lost Smith would be getting stick for playing him.

He’s been a very good manager for us who will rightly come under pressure if results and performances don’t improve. I fear that the top quality manager that you’re after may not be tempted by the project at Villa and the “talented squad” that to me still looks paper thin.

The half hadn’t ended. The ref blew his whistle to stop the game for the VAR check and not for halftime. Not quite sure why we played 2 minutes extra injury time but he didn’t blow for half time. Wasn’t a penalty for me though.

So everything positive was somebody else’s work and everything crap is his doing? I get it. Terrible last 10 minutes at wolves and terrible game tonight I completely agree. Awful manager? Nah I’m not having it. I’m sure 14th in the championship was the most favourable time to take over a struggling team. To then take that team to the premier league that season, keep them up, reach a cup final and push on to mid table doesn’t scream out awful manager to me.

Awful manager who’s taken us from the bottom half of the Championship to mid table in the Premier League?! Yes it’s been crap tonight, painfully crap. But this kind of attitude pisses me off more than the crap served up today. I get it it’s football so everything has to be instant success but I have no time for comments like this.

The amount of stick that Mings gets sometimes baffles me. The number of times he bails out team mates who make significant mistakes ( see the ridiculous free kick we took that should probably have led to a goal) is ignored completely. For me Konsa had a worse game than him but we’re now criticising our captain for being unhappy with other players making mistakes. As it is he’s probably the player in our team who I’d be least inclined to accuse of being an “utter knob”. Yes he makes the odd mistake as does every single player we have on the pitch. Feels like he gets a lot of stick for every mistake where others get off lightly.

I guess it just comes to how much you trust our medical department. If they don't think he has any more minutes in him than what he's played there then I'm not sure I'd want Smith to just leave him on regardless. To me the glaring issue in it all is that the squad that everyone was saying was much more rounded still has Nakamba as the first defensive midfield option off the bench. As we discovered last season if you have no options from the bench then it becomes very difficult to maintain form and gives other teams far more chance to change the game than we have.

I also find the reaction to someone getting a yellow card for time wasting to be a bit odd. In the ground there was a lot of "how stupid can you be?" and "that's always a yellow card" when in fact it seems to be pretty random when a referee decides to book a player for wasting time or not. For a case in point I thought the moment when he threw the ball over the keepers head as he went to take a goal kick was more stupid and probably more of a yellow card. It frustrates me when a ref can't give basic yellow cards for cynical fouls which stop a counter attack but manages to find his card to book a player at the first sign of time wasting particularly when he allows other players to waste more time.

Sports science has moved on a long way from the 70's. As was mentioned above the majority of players who had travelled to South America for the internationals didn't even play at all over the weekend. I too would prefer a half fit Luiz to Nakamba but that is more of an issue with the squad at the moment than the substitution being made. If bringing Luiz off for 20 minutes when we were leading a game at home has avoided him picking up an injury then its worth it. The fact that the players we have to bring on aren't good enough doesn't mean that the decision to take Luiz off isn't for the best if that was how long are medical staff recommended he play for.

Why would we ignore transfer fees received though? We lost a player worth £100m. We then spent £95m on players in the summer. It seems pretty ludicrous to me to only look at the money spent. By that logic if we lost our entire first team for around £300m but spent £50m to replace them you’d consider that £50m spent so we should kick on?

This just isn’t true. Atmosphere from when we scored up to the point they got it back to 2-1 was pretty good and the wolves fans were very quiet. The shift after the first Wolves goal was noticeable as you’d expect.