blunther

Would also love to chuck a few quid at this! Should someone start a thread? Guessing it might go down better if one of the longer-standing forumites started it rather than a part-timer like me.

We'd have 34 points and -27, to Bournemouth's 34 points and -25 and be down. It's a silly argument though. Who knows what happened if we went 1-0 down to Sheff U? We might have gone on to win 8-1 and win every other game. There's no way of knowing. Chaos theory ennit.

Agreed. Unfortunately I think we need to buy a new first choice keeper and let Heaton prove his fitness after an injury like that. Which worries me as our record of buying keepers is pretty dire.

I guess this is one of those that we'd be happy to keep as long as he's not the first choice each time, but we might get some decent offers to consider. Happy either way, as long as we sign a better winger in the summer which is one of our highest priorities. He's not good enough for where we want to be but has a weird knack of scoring. Either way, well done Trez!

He ain't going nowhere lads. Time to kick on. Stick a couple of decent wingers and a striker that can score into this team and Jack'll have 20 assists a year and we'll be pushing for Europe (if we can sort the keeper situation out). An extra year under the belt will do wonders for some of our younger players like Konsa and Luiz.

Top work. Bottom half of championship to promotion in less than a season. Then survival after a complete rebuild. Fantastic. He has much to learn but he's more than earned a chance to do it here.

I'm absolutely beat!

I got 19/1 on Ladbrokes earlier for that. Way better than betting on Bournemouth to stay up.

He came in part way through a season to an out of form team. Then won ten on the bounce and got promotion. Don't know what more you want from the bloke last season really.

I've only skimmed this thread and haven't been in here much recently, but I'm guessing I'm in the minority that would keep him. I think in the same way a manager like Bruce is good at keeping teams up by levelling the playing field, Smith is good at battering teams when we have better players. Even with a few key players gone well be one of the strong teams in the championship next season. Keep Smith, he'll get us up. Then sack him when we get promotion and appoint Bruce.

He'd have scored that bloody El Ghazi chance even with his leg hanging off. If I remember right there was a nice happy end to that story in that he ended up marrying the nurse who looked after him.

Ah, the Santa match. I remember it fondly. 2-0 down at half time I think.

Yeah, after we were on 4 points after 10 I accepted relegation and had a right laugh. The 0-0 with Newcastle at the end of the season was one of my villa park highlights.

Oh well, bring on the championship. We're in much better shape than last time. This is the least enjoyable season I can ever remember. No VAR and we might win some games. Let's win the (a) league.

Absolute dog dirt.

Likewise. Loved him while he's here, but once he leaves I don't care if he wins every trophy going or never plays another game again. Not our concern.

That's me done for the season. See you in August or whenever the hell it is.

How can VAR award a yellow? This season has just been made up as it's gone along.

Last chance saloon

It's not out of our hands. If we win every match I'm guessing it's impossible for us to get relegated.

I thought Hourihane looked good in there. Was very 'busy'. We still had our trademark massive cock up that led to a goal, but for once we got the right side of a refereeing howler. Can't give a goal away every game and stay up. As to football restarting, I'm not sure how to feel. I've been a grumpy bastard all day cos I've been stressed out about the match. I haven't missed that at all. Need to really think now about whether I want to renew my season ticket or not, as I haven't missed it like I thought I would. It's a lot of Saturdays and Sundays away from a young family.

If we keep a clean sheet and don't get at least a point then I think questions needs to be asked....

You're right, the deaths are delayed. In which I mean the 649 today include deaths that happened today, yesterday, the day before, often going back up to four weeks. That graph above is updated daily and deaths are retrospectively added in on the date of death. It's not perfect as we're working with incomplete data, but there's a clear demonstrable peak which passed a few weeks ago. We won't know exact numbers until long after this has passed I assume, but the pattern is becoming clear and we're thankfully on a clear downward trend now. Edited to add, the thin red horizontal bars on top of the blue are deaths announced today. You can see there have been deaths added all through the start and middle of April from today's numbers. So the blue bars on the right will indeed grow taller, but they won't get as tall as early April. To get back on topic about the football, think about other seasons ending early. We could have finished last season in the bottom half of the championship, yet we got promoted. Leicester in 2015 were rooted at the bottom of the table and cut adrift. They survived then won the bloody league. Newcastle would have a league title from Keegan's days. We could have won the league under O'Neill. It's a farcical state of affairs. A league season is each team playing each other twice. Until that happens it's not a season.

Those are deaths reported today. Some go back weeks (to the day the person actually died). We're still in the hundreds but it's hopefully not close to 700 now. The way figures are reported is really confusing and misleading. The best graph I've seen illustrating the current situation can be found here... When it comes to football, God knows. Can't do anything without upsetting loads of people. I don't see how you can relegate anyone though and call it fair. There's no relegation spot until each team has played every other team twice. It's as relevant being in 19th after 28 games as it is after 1 game or 10 games. It's only after 38 that it becomes the relegation zone. If they relegate us for that then play the next year or so behind closed doors I'll probably just jack it all in and do something more productive to be honest.