KMitch

Who? lol... Anyone know anything about him?

Tyrone Mings is a left back. He played there exclusively for Ipswich before moving to Bournemouth. He's an absolute unit, though, and because of that has filled in at CB. I remember him marking Ibrahimovic a few years ago and the two of them kicking/elbowing the snot out of each other all game.

Brentford fans say that Smith didn't rate Barbet and rarely played him. It's almost like Bruce being linked to signing Scott Hogan from us, it just ain't happening.

As hilarious as this is, I still think he looks more like Christopher Lee's Dracula than Quagmire.

Does the University of Leeds offer degrees in EFL FFP rules? Every other day it seems there is another random Leeds supporter on here trying to tell us just how fooked our finances are...

Daily mail is saying Sheffield United and Bristol City are showing interest in Scott Hogan... Unfortunately, they're both interested in loan deals...

Cahill and Austin seem like such lazy links... They go against everything that the powers at be at the club have been saying. There isn't any information leaking out of Villa Park, so the papers need to make garbage like this up.

If he had any of those other attributes, he'd be at a top Premier League team already. His work ethic is World Class, which is why I have no doubt he'll get there eventually.

A lot more effort shown by the players today. The midfield is actually tracking back and our fullbacks are charging forward on the overlap. Too bad a lot of them are still shit, but at least they're trying today.

Nope... Not worried at all. This new regime at Villa Park play their cards close to the chest. We won't hear anything until a deal is close to completion.

Why are you guys feeding the troll? He's avoiding responding to any sensible responses...

I got into football back in 2006 when I watched my first World Cup and every year since then, Messi & Ronaldo have consistently been in the top 2-3 best players in the world conversation. When they finally retire it's going to be such a shock to my perception of global football. As far back as I can remember, these two have been at the top.

Such a shitty situation. Sad news for everyone.

Alli and Kane out until March... Ouch... I always love to laugh at Spurs, but this season is causing me to almost feel sorry for them... Almost.

We're going to have a back line of absolute units... Mings, Hause, Tuanzebe, & Kalinic

Have you ever managed people before, professionally? Not talking about footballers, but just people in general? I manage manufacturing/warehousing operations professionally. You walk into one of two situations when you take a new role. You either walk into a successful site and are filling the shoes of a successful manager who created/cultivated a successful culture/team or you're stepping into a mess without a healthy work environment and possibly filled with a lot of bad apples and no accountability. They're both hard and present their own set of challenges, but the second situation is harder for most managers. The best piece of advice I've ever gotten in my career about managing people is that you either need to coach under-performing people up or coach them out, immediately. You can't turn everyone around, but you need to set the tone and the standard and hold people accountable. Some people are either burnt out at working there, have problems with their personal life and can't focus hard enough at work, some are too lazy and lack the character needed to work hard, but a lot just don't care and are happy to just punch a clock and collect a paycheck. Not everyone will work out, but you also don't want to shoot yourself in the foot and let go of too many key people too quickly, otherwise you'll overload your existing team while you try to replace the ones who have left. Comparing this to football managers, you only have limited times/resources in which to change your personnel around. For someone coming into a new team mid-season, it's tougher to make changes to your squad without losing them all. If you start ripping into your senior players who aren't performing, you'll lose the dressing room and nobody will want to play for you. You have to use what's at your disposal until you can make changes to the squad. This takes good man-management skills, but even the best man-managers in football (e.g. Klopp for instance) will struggle to turn an under-performing team around immediately, without time and resources. From my own experiences managing underpeforming teams, everything I've seen and heard from Smith and O'Kelly suggest that they know exactly what they're doing and things will be a lot better next year, after they clear out a lot of people who aren't going to fit in here. I think the players themselves already know who is on the chopping block, but Smith doesn't have the squad available to him right now to bomb them out all together.

Pretty sure he was long gone at that point. Xia threw him out right after the playoff final.

Andy Marshall, anyone? I think the guy just showed up to all those autograph sessions with the fans, just so people would look back on his career and see that yes, he was indeed on the books at Aston Villa. Reminds me of a story from my past... I'm from Detroit and I used to work at an auto factory with an ex-Detroit Lion. He was heavily involved with the NFL Alumni association and was the president of some Detroit Lions retired player association. Every single piece of clothing this guy wore had the NFL Alumni logo and all he would talk about was how he was chummy with someone at the club, going to some dinner with ex-players, showing up to charity golf events, etc. The funny thing was none of us could find anything about him on the internet at all. No game footage, no record of him on any season roster, or anything about him, other than some article from the late 80s about him playing in a college game. The only spot we could actually find anything about him was on the NFL Alumni site, from the organization he was the Detroit chapter president of. Apparently, this guy never played a single minute in regulation for the club in his entire career and only played in 3 pre-season games over a 7 year career in the NFL. From what he makes himself out to be, he was right there scoring touchdowns with Barry Sanders in the 90s, but he was actually taking snaps in the practice squad making the league minimum.

As much as I don't like Howard Hodgson, he has a point here. You can see it on the pitch that certain players just don't care enough to be bothered. They're simply going through the motions and doing just enough to not be dropped, to put themselves in the shop window for another club to pick them up next summer. Bolasie, Thor, Kodja, and Hourihane are the main offenders for me. Hutton tries, but just isn't good enough and the jury is still out on Taylor for me.

If they can find anyone WILLING to pay money for anyone in our squad, other than Grealish and McGinn, we should snap their hands off.

I mean, some of them were also trying to convince us that Dean Smith didn't do anything other than pass out bibs and place the cones at training and the players wouldn't even notice that he was gone. The massive fall off in form Brentford has had since he left must have something to do with the teams not knowing which flags to dribble around or who is who in the 5 a side training games every day...

Yeah, I love all these fans of other clubs just stopping by to tell us how small time we are now. hahaha The Brentford lads, I can understand, but what's with all the Leeds chaps?

According to the Sun, I know... lol, apparently we matched Bournemouth's 12 mil bid for Mepham and offered higher personal terms than they did, but he turned us down to play for Howe in the Premier League. It really puts things into perspective just how low we've fallen recently.

I think the main problem is that we live in a culture of instant gratification. What do you want to watch today? Open Netflix/Amazon/Hulu and you have the option to watch thousands of films/TV shows at any given time. You can play as Villa on FIFA 19 or FM19 and easily turn the club around with just armchair knowledge of football. How hard can it be in the real world? On paper, we have a collection of individuals who appear very strong, but in reality don't come together well as a cohesive team. We all knew when Smith arrived that things were going to be difficult this season and would take a while to right the ship. The problem is that we're all used to instant gratification as a society now and if things aren't going well, immediately, some fans will want to write off Smith and try to get yet another manager in for another month or so of honeymoon performances. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that and we need to be patient over the next ~2 seasons or so for the team to be rebuilt in a younger fashion.

Always loved OGS as a player. Happy to see him doing well as a manager now, even if it is for ManUre.