tom_avfc

I like this. Surely Ashley Young should be orange all the way across though! Wouldn't be surprised to see him picked in goal at some point at the rate he's going!

How can that not even be called a foul? He’s gone in studs up over the ball. Should have been a red card for Pogba and instead it’s the winning goal.

As mentioned earlier surely this is just the natural atmosphere of derby matches. The atmosphere at Villa Park when we play Small Heath is completely different to any other game. Anfied for a game against Man United is completely different than it is when teams like Villa travel there.

I’m not sure I could disagree with one post any more than I do this one. Watkins was making his return from injury and as much as I’d have liked to see more of him the chances are he only had 10-20 minutes in him. You then go on to blame Smith and the coaches for players having Covid and injuries which include a broken rib. Teams go through patches where they pick up a load of injuries. It’s nothing to do purely with us. Given the circumstances I’m OK with the 4 points we have from 3 games. Yes, it’d be nice to have picked up a couple more points but with the number of players we’ve been missing for various reasons it’s probably par. We’ve lost one of the best players in the league. If we can finish in a comfortable midtable position while moving away from the reliance on one star player then I’ll be happy enough with the progress being made.

I’m not going to lie I’m still going to side with the medical team over the blokes on a forum who “could tell it was a bad injury” from miles away. I kind of get the supporters who think they know better than the manager. It’s football, it’s about opinions. Claiming to know more than medically qualified physios about the extent of players injuries with less information than these physios have is a bit odd.

I mean there’s literally nobody in the ground better placed than the Villa physios to assess how serious the injury was. Do you actually believe that you can tell how injured a player is from your seat in the ground better than our physio team? It’s a pretty bold claim to say the least.

He played two matches scoring a 50 and a 76 at a decent strike rate. Pretty impressive. He’s a great white ball cricketer. He was a very good red ball cricketer but the money on offer to white ball specialists must be difficult to turn down for a player like Johnny Bairstow. As said by someone above, if Stokes was available then Bairstow would likely be the man to miss out.

I just assumed he’s on his way out of the club. Doesn’t seem the sort of player to hang around if he’s not getting first team football and he’s not going to get it here. I like his attitude but he just isn’t up to the standard required to make our first eleven.

Fair enough. I thought he was solid. Not at his best admittedly but it’s a new team in a number of positions and he’ll have had limited training time with them post Olympics. I’m not convinced we’re the sort of team that’s going to rack up huge numbers of passes. We seemed pretty direct today with balls played into the channels and up to Ings pretty quickly. I don’t see that changing when Watkins and Bailey come into the side either. You point out the 32 passes without mentioning that only Mings in our first eleven had more than him. Like I say he wasn’t at his best today (I don’t think we were as a team to be honest) but I think you’re being a bit harsh.

He constantly picked the ball up off the back four and Martinez and completed 91% of his passes. Against a team like Newcastle if Douglas Luiz is starring in defensive midfield then we’ve done something wrong. He was solid and is a player whose off the ball work rate goes unnoticed. It doesn’t surprise me that we look far more structured as a team with him back.

I mean he’s one of the best players in the league. He’s an improvement on what City have in a number of positions. Theres not a lot that City do “need” but there’s a reason why Grealish will start the vast majority of games for them. I kind of get the comments along the lines of “is Grealish an improvement?” from non-Villa fans but we know how good he is. I’m not going to pretend that he’s not just because he’s left Villa.

This isn’t allowed. There’s a rule in Spain where you can’t play a player less than a certain percentage (maybe 50%) of the previous year’s salary. Designed to stop teams manipulating their finances. How effective that is considering everything else that goes on in Spain is up for debate I suppose!

Genius? Its one of the most small time things I've ever seen. Its the sort of thing you'd kind of expect from Blues or Albion fans. Its also pretty weird. This whole "rivalry" with Leeds is completely bizarre.

This sort of thing annoys me to be honest. He's without doubt a fantastic player and is up there with the best players in the league. We all know that. £100 million doesn't seem like a "remarkable deal" to me and with 4 years still left on his contract I'd like to have thought we could have squeezed a bit more out of City for this one. I think it's a deal that could easily represent outstanding value for City if he can produce the form that he was here for them.

I get this point but at the same time am not convinced that we can spend £100,000,000 in a way that puts us in a better position than Grealish staying at the club. If you continually lose your better players then there really is no point. If Leon Bailey performs then he'll be the next to go in a year or two's time and it becomes impossible to compete. Its always been the way but to have it happen with a Villa fan at a time when the club is on the up is particularly tough to take.

Sky's coverage is dead because they've got rid of Tony Cottee? That's definitely one of the more interesting takes I've seen on here.

Anyone paying money to go to a pre-season game should be fully aware that the game is a fitness exercise first and foremost. They don't mean anything and pre-season games at this early a stage mean even less than pre-season games closer to the season.

By should never look too much into pre season do you mean shouldn’t take any notice of pre season results at all? Just looking quickly down the list of pre season games in the last couple of days I get the following: Cardiff 2-2 Exeter Bradford 2-0 Blackburn QPR 4-2 Man United Stevenage 1-0 Palace It’s pre season and it’s early pre season at that. Martinez, Konsa, Mings, Targett, Luiz, Sanson, Grealish and Traore are all likely first eleven players to not be on the pitch for that today. Why do you take pleasure in trying to put Villa down at every opportunity? If we’d beat Stoke 10-0 would you have been on here saying how much better than Man United we look ahead of the new seasons

I get this and there's no doubt that this is part of the issue here but I'm not convinced that an app telling people to isolate is solely responsible for these issues. If it were then I'd imagine the rules around isolation would change pretty quickly and that this would resolve the issue pretty quickly. I'd imagine that the shortage of HGV drivers as a result of the exodus of EU drivers post Brexit plays as big if not a bigger part in the shortages and is a far more difficult issue to resolve for those in charge. It may be me being cynical but having a 'pingdemic' (one of the worst words I've ever seen coined incidentally) to blame these shortages on seems a pretty convenient way of averting the public's eyes from another consequence of Brexit.

It’s just Boris being “stupid” not racist is an interesting take to say the least. Reading this thread is pretty painful in general. At the point that we get to “all lives do matter - are you saying they don’t?” I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no reasoning with some people. Unfortunately looking at the people who are consistently elected to run the country it seems like there’s a large proportion of people in this country who are (wilfully or not) completely ignorant to the issues we have with racial equality.

This is correct. First coin toss which we won was for choice of end. Second coin toss which we lost was for first penalty taker. I’m sure we’d have gone first if we had the option.

Yeah this is how I saw it too. It looks worse because he’s missed the target but at least there’s some technique to the penalty and if he’s just rolled the ball in rather than dragged it slightly it’s a great penalty. The fact that he’d scored 15/17 penalties before last night suggests he’s a pretty good penalty taker. The Saka and Sancho ones are just dreadful penalties. If the keeper goes the right way he’s saving them every single time. Was surprised to see Sancho coming on to take a penalty to be honest as he’s never struck me as a player with a great ball striking technique. Would have thought there were better options even on that bench last night than him. Saka is another player who you just thought was going to miss as soon as he stepped up. Just seemed a really odd couple of choices to me.

I mean this is correct if you ignore the fact that at the last World Cup we had an even easier route to a final that we still couldn’t reach. I would say that I’m not convinced we’ll ever have an easier final to win than that one. 65,000 England fans at Wembley against an Italy team that looked there for the taking in the first half if we’d shown any sort of attacking intent. Just a disappointing way to lose a final and the fact that we bored our way to penalties only to miss 3 out of 5 makes it all the more disappointing.

The problem is that Sterling will start on the left and rightly so as he has been up there with the best players in the tournament playing in that position. I don’t think you can start Grealish on the right as he would be completely ineffective there so I guess you’d have to pick Sancho or Saka there. That leaves the one position where I’d actually like to see Jack starting in attacking midfield. Mount hasn’t really done anything in this tournament so I’d like to see Grealish or Foden get a start there to be honest.

Couldn’t agree more with this. He looked as delighted as anybody to have played his part in getting England to a major final. I actually find the reading into his body language etc. all a bit odd and makes us look pretty small time. Southgate has made a decision (not one that I’d have made) to try and see out the game. At the end of the day it’s worked and we’ve won a semi final. He’ll likely turn to Grealish again come 60 minutes in the final if we need a goal. That’s Jack’s role and once we got the goal he clearly felt that tightening it up was the way to go.