KMitch

I disagree with this... He's more Lampard than Gerrard. Stevie was a tenacious defender and had a workrate similar to McGinn's in his prime.

JJ is the least photogenic person I've ever seen...

Too slow, bad attitudes, and their agent Paul Heyman has a bigger mouth than Craig Butler... May chokeslam Gerrard if they get subbed off and Heyman will be in the news every day talking about how he'll embarrass Purslow!

The most overrated player in the Premier League is Declan Rice, but Kalvin Phillips is right up there in the conversation with him. Douglas Luiz is better than him and for a fraction of the wages. Can't wait for Villa fans next season to start talking about how we "need to play him as an 8 and not a 6" because he isn't a brick shithouse destroyer...

Is anyone going to do anything beside stand around watching Arsenal take the ball off us??? WTF is going on?

So... This shitty formation which we haven't won with in 2022 is our Plan B? Looks like we need to develop a Plan C...

Yep... Very scared for this summer. Sure, we may get Coutinho and a new midfield, but if that doesn't work, we just went backwards and have to write off another season, but with a much more expensive squad.

Sanson is the new Reo Coker... Gets better and better the longer he sits on the bench...

Uh... If Smith was still our manager, he'd be crucified for setting us up like that. Midfielders aren't preventing Watkins from being isolated up front and having to try to win the ball against 2-3 defenders every time. This isn't he same formation/style of play we played with the 3 wins in a row, it's the same as the 3 before that when we were awful.

Pathetic... We're incredibly easy to defend against... Just press the hell out of us high up the pitch and mark Coutinho out of the game. The same as in our run of defeats.

Not really... Jacob Ramsey of last season wasn't the JJ of this season. Sanson would be playing in the team instead of him if he wasn't plagued with so many injuries since signing and JJ didn't step up and develop as rapidly as he has in the past year or so.

I doubt our club captain and outspoken advocate for racial equality would take too kindly to Suarez joining the team. Suarez would cause Gerrard to lose a portion of the dressing room and I don't think he would make that mistake. Suarez isn't coming here.

TBH, I'm not. Purslow has stressed several times that this is a long term project of getting us profitable and looking for transfer targets who can grow in value, while continuing to progress up the table. First, we had to get promoted, then we had to build a squad to survive, then we had to become an established Prem side out of the relegation battle, now, we have to challenge for Europe. We overachieved a bit last season when Jack was in the team and pulling the strings, then we started to look like a relegation side with Grealish on the sidelines. This year's goal was to obviously build a squad to be able to kick on without Jack, hence the huge investment in attacking players, but we've also been shrewd with all our transfers in terms of fees as well. We've gotten good players for a fair price (Buendia, Bailey, Ings), bargain bin finds for next to nothing with a lot of experience (Young & Chambers), and capitalized on misfortunes of other clubs and gotten high level players who would normally be out of our reach (Digne & Coutinho). We've also been hunting for a midfielder for two windows now, but have shown we will not over pay for one, especially with anticipating prices to drop this summer. I'm going to guess that the defenders we're after aren't there right now, in terms of price vs quality right now.

9th is the most realistic goal for us to achieve this season. Spurs are 9 points ahead of us with a game in hand... It'll be a struggle to catch them with 10 games left in the season, unless we go on an incredible run (which is unlikely considering the strength of the teams we have left in the schedule). TBH, 9th place would be a good achievement, considering all the problems and change we had this season.

I feel like this squad is too lopsided to be consistent. We spent a lot on attacking players this year and have a depth of attacking talent which most teams would be envious of... Coutinho, Buendia, Ings, Watkins, Bailey, Traore, JJ... but on the other hand, our lack of depth in talent for other areas leaves us wanting. For example, Digne going out for Ashley Young massively blunts our attacking threat down the left. Need to keep buying players one at a time to make all positions stronger. Need to keep heavily investing in quality players this summer for the center of the pitch and in defense.

Of course... Yarmolenko out for months, but comes off the bench to score against us... FFS...

Dawson really is a fooking clogger...

Brilliant save from Emi!!!

West Ham are tough to play against. They stick 10 men behind the ball, press hard in their own half, then quickly counter and foul hard in the opposition's half. Teams underestimate them, but we seem to be aware of their threat going forward. That said, we're struggling to break them down in attack. This game has 1-0 written all over it... Just need to make sure we're the ones who can make the adjustments at half time.

Yeah, of all the fouls in this game, that boot to the face was one of the cleanest.

West Ham fans really are dispicable... Booing our players every time they go down for an obvious injury... Cash gets a cross in the face and goes down, crowd boos. Chambers is bleeding and goes down to get cleaned up, crowd boos. Douglas Luiz gets a boot to the face, gets a chorus of boos...

VillaTalk Logic: If we win: Gerrard is a tactical genius for not rotating his lineup If we don't win: Gerrard is naive for not rotating his lineup Konsa lost his place because when he was out injured, Chambers played a blinder... Chambers played well again the following game, so Konsa needs to buy his time. Sanson hasn't done anything at all in his appearances to warrant a start. JJ had an off day last week, but he's young and inconsistency is something ALL young players will deal with.

Can't write a story about Villa without shoehorning Arsenal/Spurs into it somehow too...

This is absolutely 100% his agent playing games. I read somewhere that his agent doesn't have other clients and is trying to play hardball with Villa to try to maximize his own gain.