rodigan

what frustrates me is that we don't seem to fear any team at the moment for 70 minutes and then turn into terror-stricken kids for the last 20.... you could just see the panic spread across the team in the last 15 against arsenal - suddenly everyone's just looking to hoof it away anywhere as fast as they can.... that is where we need a couple of wise heads just to calm everyone down and say, you know what lads, we're doing ok here, lets just keep going and we'll be fine.... if we could get that message through, we'll be fine... UTV

i think QPR are done... in fact, i think the unbeaten run they had at the start of the year overly flattered them, and was almost exclusively down to the brilliance of julio cesar in goal... the fact that they didn't pick wins up in that run, and have now reverted to losing, i think will do them.... similar thoughts for reading... again they had a run on the back of some phenomenal scoring by lefondre coming on as a sub in the last few minutes of games. that wasn't going to last, and looks like it hasnt... i know everyone is thinking wigan are certs to stay up, but again i don't take it as a given... sure they've been here before, but i have a sneaking suspicion that they may have ridden their luck as far as it goes.... i'm also hoping that the guy who almost singlehandedly kept them up a couple of seasons ago has the bit between his teeth to do it again for his new team.... god knows he owes us one... perhaps i am just overly optimistic but hey, whether i think villa will stay up or not has absolutely no bearing on anything other than my mental wellbeing.... UTV

i must be one of the rare few who think we're still in this with all to play for... 11 games left, need something just above a point a game and i think we'll squeeze home... i think we have materially improved over the first 70 minutes of games in the last few games - we're giving ourselves a chance of winning these games.... what we need to do now is get a bit of composure for the last 20 minutes... i don't know how PL knocks it out of the players, but they just have to get themselves out of the shitting their pants mindset where they just panic and kick the ball away in the last 20 minutes... i was hoping that holding on for the win against west ham would show the team that it is possible not to lose, but the lesson is difficult to endorse with fixtures against arse and man city as the next two.... i don't know - i just have the sense that get through this weekend without being spanked and we're going to go into the must win fixtures and get some results... of our last 10 fixtures, only man u and chelsea are the ones where we would presume no points - reading, qpr, liverpool, stoke, fulham, norwich, sunderland, wigan - none of these teams can say they've had good seasons and all of those are games that I think we have a real chance of picking up three points.... of course i'm worried, but i just think that we're looking better and more settled now... squeaky bum time as my friend tayls likes to say, but going in thinking we'll make it!!! UTV

looks to have been kicked in the nuts for the last few games.... his value on the pitch is a tireless workrate, harassing and getting in the face of the opposition, and i just haven't seen that happen of late... there were a couple of games earlier in the season where i got that sense of urgency from the whole team, with holman leading from the front.... PL needs to find that confidence and instil it back in bretty - if he can get zoggy firing, lets hope he can do the same for holman... we need every single player to be playing at the tops of their games (whatever that may be) between now and may for us to stand any chance lets smash wet spam this weekend... UTV

hes doing better than he was, and is looking increasingly influential for us.... a rare ray of sunshine - long may it last!!!

i think we'll win on saturday by a couple of goals... am seeing good things up front - bentekkers is still flying, weimann is dangerous and gabby and zoggy are starting to play with a bit of swagger... KEA very much surprised me on the upside against everton and sylla looked fine bearing in mind the situation he came into. vlaar has a couple of games under his belt and i think its just going to take one clean sheet for things to start coming good for us... we can now have a consistent back four of lowton, vlaar, clark and bennett - like it or not, its what we have.... lets get them playing together each week and build some confidence in each other... actually, as i see it, the starting XI is finally beginning to settle down, at least in my mind... guzan lowton vlaar clark bennett westwood KEA / delph zoggy weimann benteke gabby thats the team as it is... lets give them the confidence to know that the future of villa lies in their hands and let them play like their lives depend on it.... a win this weekend and we're in with a shout.... UTV

is makoun still at rennes? i notice he is in our squad list on the OS...

to me, SI is the footballing equivalent of rugby's danny cipriani. extremely talented as a youngster, with great potential, that was extrapolated way too far, before he'd had the time to show that he would live up to that potential. both then rightly or wrongly became media focuses off the pitch, with happenings off the pitch being used as excuses for failing to be the next jonny wilkinson (in cipriani's case) or among the most technically gifted footballers around (in SI's case)... as such, neither player has been allowed to develop in the same way that other players have - SI is now only 26, but has been held to the standard of an exceptional footballer for many years now. look at bannan delph, herd, lichaj and clark at 22 / 23. when he was that age, he was man city's player of the year, and through fortuitous timing at the club was awarded the five year contract that put him on the wages that have worked against him ever since.... having been given that contract, he went from player of the year to pariah with the sacking of hughes and the arrival of mancini... and the rest is history - he has hardly played again regularly since then.... to me, its not surprising that he looks like a shell of the player with the potential that he showed at the time... another person that springs to mind when thinking of SI is andy carroll. if he was an 8m player, people would have a very different opinion view of him than they do today. I don't hold it against these players signing contracts like that - if someone came up to me and told me they thought i was great and worth 5m a year, there's no doubt in my mind i'd thank them very much for their belief and take the contract. there are plenty more young players that will follow the same path - jordan henderson, wilfried zaha, chris smalling, chris samba, the fat pudding that was in the press recently (was it michael johnson?), half a dozen at chelsea... are these guys world beaters? no. did they ask to be held up as world beaters? probably not. will the expectation work against them? probably, much depends on how they are nurtured. walcott / oxlade-chamberlain / wilshere seem to me to be good examples of how it should be done... i have a lot of time for Brendan Rogers' approach to Raheem Sterling, and holding firm the line that you don't get a big contract at a young age, as it becomes a burden while you're developing as a player... Having said that, I don't think that Villa is a club that has the luxury of developing Ireland over a long period of time. plus, when you are paying him as a marquee player, unfortunately, the development time is not factored into the price.... for that he needs to go and sign a sensible contract and just work on playing football regularly again somewhere that he can do it... so unfortunately, i think we need to get rid of him based on where we are, and what he have ahead, but i don't think that he is a guy that doesn't care when he's on the pitch - i think he cares enormously about what the fans think about him... i just don't think he's good enough or confident enough to turn his game around in the cameo roles he's being given. i also think he could be someone like taarabt is for QPR if given the show of confidence that harry redknapp has shown in him... as an aside, i don't think he's anything like the arrogant person some on here seem to think he is. i have always found him to be very humble - vain perhaps, but not arrogant...

i think your estimate of numbers of players in the first team squad is low. remember most of the kids signed up three year contracts in the last year or so - even if the base is as low as 10, they will have appearance fees which will bump that up very quickly - very few of our kids have not been playing.... thing is, if you band the players by an approximation (in a really shoddy, uniformed way), i think it looks something like this: so, if we say the following are on an average of say 60k per week: db9 steven ireland gabby shay given stan zoggy thats 19 million then you have some on say 40k per week: dunne delph thats 4 million then you have those on say 30k per week: guzan vlaar benteke holman el ahmadi thats 8 million then you have the youngsters who lets say over the course of a year are on an average of 20k per week - these are all playing and have signed contracts in the last year, or have just been bought in, so i don't think its too far out, from what i understand: clark lowton westwood weimann herd bannan bennett bowery baker sylla dawkins gardner albrighton lichaj stevens makoun (top up under loan arrangement) hutton (top up under loan arrangement) thats 17.5 million and then if we assume the rest are being paid nothing: carruthers williams marshall johnson delfouneso burke that comes to 48.5 million. the problem is that very few of the players in the top bracket are playing - only gabby, and more recently zoggy - 40% of the wages is giving us 18% of our starting XI, with a squad of 25 to cover... i wonder where our actual wage bill today sits relative to the premier league as a whole. i'm sure, even with all of the cutting, its not 19th, which means that there is still more cutting to do before we can rebuild. and i am also not kidding myself that the very few players this season who have enhanced their value (mostly a mr benteke) will be content to sit one day longer than the 19th may before that number becomes something untenable for us.

The Club is running at a substantial loss – regardless of why, that’s a simple fact of the matter. That loss in aggregate gets bigger every year. At some point, that number gets so big, the Club fails and goes into administration. If we get relegated, that loss on an annual basis gets substantially bigger immediately. At that point is it (when combined with other existing losses) big enough to threaten the existence of AVFC? If so, then much as I hate the results that we are seeing on the pitch, I fully support the decision to seek a point of financial stabilty even if that means relegation – the future of the club is, in my humble opinion, more important than the performance this season. I can also see validity in the argument that while spending large in January may have saved us this season, until the club is sustainable on an ongoing basis, we would likely have only compounded the problem. What we need to do is get the very best out of the team that we have – to effectively outperform the sum of our individual parts… david moyes does that, Roberto Martinez, Brendan rogers did at Swansea, paul lambert did at Norwich… What I will say about PL is that he appears to understand what he has to do, and is trying (I’m not going so far as to say, succeeding) to do so… What I really want the Club to do is to tell the fans what the plan is, and to give us some idea whether off the pitch, we are getting close to having achieved it. I reckon the 31 May 2012 numbers are out at the end of this month, which should give us some idea. What it won’t tell us is the wage number that the Club is trying to achieve and how our actual number sits relative to that. It will also be nine months out of date – nine months where there have been massive changes in the squad set up.

i want to not get that sense of dread when we go 2-0 up... i want to not have to make some witty add-on when i say i support the villa to pre-empt the scorn / pity that invariably comes with the reply... i want to see some clean sheets to do this, i want a new left back, or failing which warnock back in the starting XI and a sense of swagger from our CBs. I like what i have been seeing from benteke, gabby, weimann, westwood and most surprisingly of all delph in the last couple of weeks... i want to look forward to saturdays again...

and i'd take reo-coker over delph or KEA in our midfield right now, no problems at all....

no question in my mind, that qpr have the quality to stay up if they have a manager that can point them all in the right direction and get them playing well... i also have no doubt that tony fernandes has done something very similar to the spend of the early MON years - QPR have bought in 24 players over the last two seasons, the vast majority of which will be on substantial packages and have little or no sell-on value.... even if they stay up this year, they have problems that will take years to work out, as we have found out to our expense.... for us, at least we're starting to see the injury problems easing a bit - vlaar, dunne, westwood, gabby, zoggy all back... bent close... given doing fine when he gets a game - these are senior players (with the exception of westwood, but i think he's great, so i'll include him here) and were all not available to us over the horror show that was christmas... i also think that if stephen warnock is sitting at home waiting for a game, we should bring him back into the fold - the lad may have been shit, when we had the luxury of a new manager, new players and lots of optimism... we don't have that now, and it looks like noones coming in to buy him.. with these senior players back, i can see us as the 14th place team we were before the christmas break... add a couple of new players in, and we should be fine... presuming we add no new players in the window, my team would be: gk: guzan lb: warnock cb: vlaar cb: clark rb: lowton cm: westwood cm delph cm: zoggy lw: gabby cf: benteke rw: weimann subs: given bennett dunne, or until he's ready, baker herd ireland bannan bent, or until he's ready, bowery

i never thought the day would come when i said it, but isn't warnock still on our books? perhaps the dross we're playing at left back is making me look back with rose tinted glasses, but i just think that he's there and he would at least play with a bit of authority, something that we're so desperately needing all over the park...

enjoying being a villa fan for the first time in a while... justified or not, i'm loving it at the moment... and am looking forward to the games without the usual sense of dread... i'd love to get through the month with several clean sheets... if we can start to look tight at the back again, everything will be rosy....

i actually like this article a lot in terms of providing what appears to be a credible reason for bent not playing. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1433717-aston-villa-tactics-explaining-the-darren-bent-situation

banger, i know the squad was shite, not to mention the pitch which was abysmal... it would be almost insulting if they got full caps for this series of qualifiers... and while it is not reflective of the overseas players, it goes some way to explain why emile seems to banging them in for fun in the A-league!!! don't think wilkshere was playing but archie thompson and richard garcia were.... emerton looked like a carthorse, but did enough to score the winner.... matt mackay was probably the best player on the pitch, but as he was wearing a scrum-cap noone took him seriously... going to watch the victory against the jets on 21st, so will be interesting to see how emile's going...

sat in the freezing cold watching the socceroos play hong kong last night - think there's no doubt we got the cream of the aussie talent in bretty holman and chris herd... they were pants!!!

think CB is going to be a priority, as dunne missing half the season has thrown a real spanner in the works, and is the only area where we really have no cover... also suspect that PL has concerns about lichaj... he'll stick with stevens and bennett, but not sure that he will consider that to be suficient.... think we'll look for a back up striker, but only if bent goes... finally, midfield / wingers is the trickiest one, as we now seem to have a lot of people, but not so much quality... westwood, KEA, delph, bannan, ireland, herd, albrighton, n'zogbia, holman, and then with gabby and weimann also playing out wide... can see him bringing in keane in jan again to fill the hole behind benteke - not sure what his view on ireland is, but i think that generally we are better with him in the team than not... would love a natural winger to swap for weimann, and a stronger midfielder to play alongside westwood. its funny reading the past 15 pages - i remember when we used to buy players whose names we could both pronounce and spell...

having scored more last season than this at this stage is merely a reflection of the respective teams that mcleish and PL started with... its only in the second half of the season that the impact of the new manager starts to reflect on the team, and we all know how the second half of last season went for us. look at MON's second six months in charge... di matteos... i'll take where we are today in terms of squad, potential, approach, attitude than this time last year any day of the week... anyone have any idea on concrete ron, we'll need wise heads against stoke, even though i thought baker was excellent on saturday...

and another thing, as far as him going to QPR - paying in excess of GBP10m for a 28 year old striker is absolutely not tony fernandes modus operandi, in football or in his other businesses.... much as it makes sense and harry would love it, i just don't see it happening... its important to remember that for all people think money is being thrown at qpr, TF has less net worth than randy. further, in his core businesses, he has far more at stake, and far greater needs for capital... i suspect he is already realising that owning a premier league football club is a massive folly - to take another highly paid footballer on an expensive long term contract, with little resale value is not something that i think will appeal to him...

right.... i'll throw in my thoughts on this again, having just caught up on the last 20 pages. first, i presume that bent is off in january, although i am not sure what the reason is - 50 game add-on fee, PL doesn't like him, bent doesn't want to play... could be any of them. i think that PL's approach with the press is to insinuate, without directly saying so, that the reason DB is not in the matchday squad is down to his application in training being insufficient. i don't draw any conclusions from this - he may be right, or it may be that he is being sold for one of the first two reasons, but it makes no sense for PL to bring the vitriol of the fans down on him and / or the club, by directly saying so. if there was no intention to sell bent in january - his place would be on the bench right now... but, if the club intend to keep bent, and assuming that he is now fit, then PL needs to sit down with him (if he hasn't already) and set out the parameters on which he would stay at the club and how PL plans to play him - 'clear the air' talks if you will.... at that point, both PL and bent can figure out whether or not this works for them and move on, one way or the other. my thought on whether PL thinks this is possible, is that if the structure is a big focal point CF like benteke, with support from say gabby and weimann (or new purchases in January) then bent is not a like-for-like fit for any of those three. bringing him on for benteke means that we lose the ability to play it to a big man who can hold the ball up and lay it off to players coming through. as such, what i can see happening is selling bent and replacing him with a large young striker currently playing in europe, who will be far closer to a like to like swap for benteke when he comes off / is injured / gets suspended... a couple of other more general thoughts: PL finds himself now in a difficult position with dealing with bent - if he plays DB9 or puts him on the bench, the whole game becomes about him, which I am sure PL believes is entirely unfair to the rest of the squad. he may also be seen as backing down on a stance that he has taken and i'm sure the daily mail will delight in playing that up as a moral victory for bent... harry redknapp's article a few pages back where he tried to apologise for the treatment of bent in the spurs days was, for me, very telling... harry made a stupid comment that he shouldn't have made... however, that was it - bent decided that statement made his position at the club untenable and was out of there almost immediately. in the words of harry: "I like Darren, I have no problems with him. I just made a comment that maybe I shouldn’t have. It was difficult, he didn’t like that and within no time he decided he wanted to go.” this isn't the first time this has happened in bent's career.... so, i guess in conclusion, i am seeing nothing that suggests to me that bent is staying after january... i think he will be replaced by a young striker that can act as a target man, that is doing well in his own european league, and that will work his socks off for the team. the residual money will be used to buy a winger to fill the role currently being filled by andi weimann - that will give us a few more options up front for the rest of the season. however, if that's decided and agreed by both bent and lambert, i'd put bent right back on the bench - we really really need him for now when things aren't going right, like the first hour against reading on tuesday.

as i look at the other teams in the premier league, i see the pool of teams in a similar predicament to us far larger than i had originally imagined. QPR, reading, southhampton, norwich, sunderland, wigan, newcastle, swansea, west ham, stoke, fulham and even though they are going well right now, the baggies.... 12 teams, none of whom fundamentally strike fear into me - they may be winning at the moment, but i don't fundamentally think they are teams that we should reasonably be expecting to lose against... simple fact is, these are all games that we should go into without fear of losing to a team that is fundamentally better than ours... its simply not a case that the three or four teams around us are the only ones that we can reasonably expect to win... and even when you look at many of the established teams, and in reaility, they're not really firing consistently either - chelsea, arsenal, liverpool, everton, spurs... its all going to be about little runs of results, spurts of momentum that see teams through to safety... west brom and norwich have just had one... southampton and wigan too, to a lesser extent... i don't think any of the 12 teams i mentioned will consistently manage strong results for the duration of the season... west brom losing to swansea last night a perfect example... two winnable games coming up - win at least one of those and draw the other, and we have momentum that would see us happily open up some space from the relagation zone... who knows how good we can be playing with some confidence.... stevie ireland, barry bannan, definitely confidence players in my mind... get them playing with a smile, bentekkers slamming them in and our defence believing that they can continue to keep clean sheets and villa park will be rocking again... the beauty of playing with a team of kids, is that often they are unburdened with the fear of defeat... it must have been having had a good night's sleep, but things are definitely looking somewhat rosier today, even if nothing's actually changed... clean sheet on saturday, and i may even venture a little smile...

i'd love to know the answer to this one... although, if the trigger is 50 and he's on 47, i'd still put him on the bench, with two games still to play with.... last night was screaming out for him to come on in the last half hour for say weimann, and slot a couple... there will be more situations like that, i'm sure... if the deal with liverpool has been cut, then there's no point trying to prove something by leaving him out... make the most of him that we can in the little remaining time that we have him, within the parameters of his contract... i suspect benty would bite PL's arm off for a chance to show him what he can do, even if only as a big fxxk you as he heads out... it will also allow him a fair departure with the fans, because out of all of this, his departure will be painted as one orchestrated by him, whether or not that is actually the case...

two clean sheets in a row, and who'd have thunk it, we've scored the winner from a corner.... a good win, and a priceless three points, and i guess all the lads can do is win... however, having stayed up til 4am to watch the game, i must admit, i am more concerned about our quality relative to other teams than i have been for a while... reading were very very poor, and we made bloody hard work of getting the win... the amount of clear chances that we missed in front of goal, to me says exactly why we need someone like bent in the squad. we really should have put away three or four yesterday, and i wasn concerned as to what plan b is, when barry b, andi weimann et al aren't firing on all cylinders.... thought ireland was excellent when he came on, and love the clean sheet.... all in all, great result, but my underlying feeing is that even if bent does go in january, lets make the most of him when we have him... even if thats only for 20 mins when things aren't going right for us...