icouldtelltheworld

No I get that, but in response to the original point - ten years ago I imagine that Jack's dad envisioned his son having a successful career in professional football. He's achieved that and then some. People really need to let it go, a lot of posts here are reminiscent of a jilted ex oversharing on Facebook

Definitely- my old man is forever pointing out that Andy Townsend was moving upwards in his career by joining us

Bit of an odd take really, it's entirely possible that his dad remains a big Villa fan, but a bigger fan of his son. It seems weird to us who aren't involved in the professional game, but I'm sure Grealish snr. is incredibly proud of his son and all that he has achieved. Jack may have come across as a pillock at times, but it's clear he comes from a good family so a bit odd to bring them into it.

Definitely. Should have been gone a while ago tbh and made a pragmatic decision to bring someone more suited in. They could do a lot worse than Dyche, although their fans would probably be up in arms about that

Final point- losing Richarlison could well be seen as akin to us losing Benteke. They'd have been relegated without him last year and don't seem to have come close to replacing what he brought to the team

I think you're probably right there, although IMO the overall quality of the league is much higher these days, so you perhaps get fewer opportunities to get yourself out of danger

I think the main similarities between them and us when we went down emerge from how the way the club has been run has started to affect things on the pitch. Huge sums of money wasted, managers sacked regularly without any succession planning, leading to a disjointed squad on high wages and low motivation. Then you have the disconnect between the fans and the club hierarchy, which inevitably starts to affect the players by making the club into a toxic place to play football. No matter the quality of your squad, those factors combined will inevitably start to have an impact. I think they're probably down tbh, we know full well there's only so many years that you can circle the drain before it catches up with you

I know what you mean. Kind of related, but I'm always surprised by how (relatively) inactive their main forum is compared with VT. For example - their thread on Potter has 175 pages, almost 100 less than our thread for Emery, and if Emery was performing as badly as Potter ours would be even more active. They are a huge club, but then again they also aren't really. I'm not convinced they have the entrenched support of United, Liverpool or Arsenal, and if they were to endure a period without any success or CL football, I don't think it would take long for them to fade back into relative obscurity.

They very much were - lots of chatter about doping and referee bias during the season that Leicester won the title

Confirms a lot of how I saw it - he was tying to get us up the pitch and play one-twos with team mates he isn't quite familiar with. Looks to have an extra yard of pace compared with the likes of Targett and Digne which is exciting

Lost the ball a lot, but tbh after his first ten minutes I thought most of them were a result of not knowing his team mates rather than a lack of ability or quality. Will fit in well here I reckon, you could see what he was trying to do

The good times are back at the Villa!

It's a funny thing really, suspect if at the start of the season we'd been told that at this stage we would be only 3 points behind Liverpool, most of us would've taken that. If someone had said that we'd be 6 points and 5 places behind Fulham, we'd have been less happy... Thought we battled hard and earned a decent three points. Some indication of how Emery wants us to play, but lots of room for improvement

Said he did it towards the France fans because they'd been abusing him during the match

Signed when we thought we were still going to be a championship team for another season. Seems a nice lad, but never PL quality really. Played his part in keeping us up in 19/20 so fair play to him, wish him all the best for the future

They must be crackers

Mendy found not guilty The Guardian

Must have been fairly highly regarded, England had a lot of good centre backs around then. The extent of my knowledge of him is that he scored an own goal against us and has a knack for fraudulent pyramid schemes!

Typical vilers mate all from the shires mate never drank in town mate. Mate.

That's a good one, used to obsessively watch a VHS of the 98/99 season when I was about 6, some distant part of my brain has just instantly recalled him scoring an own goal against us while playing for Charlton Clearly been a busy boy since!

Our run to the final in 19/20 was pretty easy in fairness until Leicester in the semis

Looks like they've finally allowed people to drink alcohol in Qatar

Absolutely would not like to come up against him and Mings in any kind of battle

Anonymous

Unfortunately so - a few of the Brigada lads are friends of mine. Certainly in the modern era, Villa's hooligan element is very much of the NF/EDL variety