KMitch

As someone who has dated several women way out of my league before, you never know how she'll respond until you ask for her number. You'd be surprised to know just how little extremely beautiful women actually get approached, because of the fact that most guys already assume they have no chance to begin with. Pretty sure the same thing applies to recruiting footballers. Teams below the Top 6 in the table have signed some fantastic players over the years and ESR/JWP were definitely within our capability of buying this summer. Ambitious, but not out of our reach. I don't think the negotiations between Arsenal/Southampton and Villa went as well as Lange/Purslow had hoped to make a transfer fee within our budget possible, plus Jack himself was a huge draw for potential signings. I'd much rather go after players like we signed this summer (Buendia, Ings, & Bailey) vs just paying a premium for the best non-promoted Championship players each summer.

You mean the same guy who knew fook all about our summer transfers now somehow has the inside line on the inner dealings at the club? Come on...

4 months ago we were smugly bragging to ourselves how fantastic our club is being run on NSWE's watch and how far we've come in the past 3 seasons. Now? VillaTalk is on suicide watch with all kinds of baseless claims/conspiracy theories everywhere. Go to the Purslow thread and see baseless posts on how he's meddling in football business and that Lange is just a scout with a DoF title... Go to the Lange thread and see people calling for his head because he signed Ings instead of a DM and masterminded pushing out Terry and ROK... Go to the Smith thread and see all kinds of Villa versions of chemtrails and flat earth theories about bust ups with Mings, losing the dressing room, and bumbling coaching ineptness suggesting that ROK and Terry were the real brains behind the operation (conveniently forgetting that most of them blamed Terry for our defensive woes 2 seasons ago)... VillaTalk really has become a depressing place again. I'm probably disappearing until our form improves and the next transfer window rolls around, or Smith actually gets the sack. My blood pressure can only go so high.

I for one would be angry if Deano lost his job, just to be replaced by Terry, Lampard, or Stevie Fookin' G. That's not sound business, it's panicking at best... Who were the previous names we were linked to after Bruce, besides Henry? Wasn't there apparently communication from Purslow with one of Mourinho's old assistants and a Spanish manager that Suso recommended?

I don't buy that. We spent the past 3 seasons building a DoF/Recruitment/Analytics team and system for scouting/signing players who fit the same system we've put in place from the U18s up through the 1st team. I don't care who we have as the manager now, the club won't sanction signings that aren't vetted and endorsed properly by all parties within the team. Now, the one thing a world class manager would bring to us is possibly being able to tip the scales in our favor when signing some highly sought after talent. Someone might not be really interested in playing for mid-table Aston Villa, but would be interested in playing for the manager, regardless of the club. I still think expecting European footy this season, without Jack, was not even a realistic expectation barely anyone had before the season even began. Now, I'm seeing Deano getting criticized for bad recruitment and for missing out on Europe by some here, which wasn't even a discussion this summer.

It's not only that, they only go to clubs with a short term aim to "win now" instead of building for the future. Look at the awful short-sighted signings on terrible 5-6 season deals teams make for players that these managers just had to have, but after the manager fooks off to the next "project" the next manager doesn't favor these ones and the club struggles to shift them. Rinse and repeat over and over and the next thing you know, you have an unbalanced squad of aging overpaid specialists with 2-3 actual quality players (Spurs, Arsenal, Everton, etc.), and the club struggling to balance the books.

To be honest, I think Pep, Mourinho, Klopp, Ancelotti, & Conte would struggle to get us into the top 6 with the squad we have at the moment... Also, look at the managers are in the clubs around us who have the experience you're calling for and have managed top 6 clubs (Moyes, Rafa, & Rodgers). Do you really think any of them could get this team into the top 6?

Great post overall. To respond to your last point, I don't think the overall opinion on Smith has shifted as much as Villa Talk and the media would have you believe. We don't have an angry mob picketing BMH calling for Smith's head or throwing cabbages at him, like we've done with some of our previous managers that the overwhelming majority of us have wanted out. There has always been an extremely vocal minority who has criticized Smith every time we've hit a rough patch in form, but 4 losses on the bounce has us all feeling a bit frustrated at the moment. The big question this time around is how will Smith and the players respond to the media pressure which is starting to build? We've always had Grealish in the past to have a moment of brilliance or two to lift the team and create that belief we can turn things around, but we don't have that luxury anymore. We need someone to step up and prove a point.

Are we recruiting for the Championship already?

Speaking of manager speculation, Newcastle is apparently down to the massive world class shortlist of... Eddie Howe and Unai Emery... Granted, it's a hell of a step up from Bruce and Pardew, but quite a ways away from some of the fantasy names thrown around by their fans.

Joe Fookin' Kinnear or we riot!!!

Or the "Why don't we throw 50 million at a 'quality' DM?" posts every day. haha

This is "results-oriented thinking" and it's the exact opposite of how we need a manager to think... Let me put it into perspective for you... Lets say you and I play a game where we flip a coin and if it lands heads, I pay you $200 and if it lands tails, you pay me $100. If we play for 100 games, statistically, you'd be up $10,000 and the odds clearly favor you... but what happens if you lose the first 5 games we play? Your risk aversion/loss prevention response kicks in and a lot of people would refuse to play the game any further because they lost previously when they tried it and would like to avoid losing again, even though statistically playing again favors you. Bad beats happen, even though the rules favor you. Same thing applies to bad decisions which happen to pay off through luck. Let's look at another scenario where we roll a 6 sided die. Option 1, if you roll a 1-5, you win $100, but if you roll a 6, you owe me $50. Option 2 is if you roll a 1-5, you pay me $1000, but if you hit a 6, you win $2000. You pick Option 2, which is clearly the wrong choice statistically for you, but you hit a 6 and win big. Are you a genius because you won by making a bad decision? No, you're clearly lucky and over time things will not work out in your favor picking Option 2 over and over again. This is why casinos consistently make a lot of money and people who have gambling habits are always broke. When applied to football, just looking at results when it comes to decision making is a terrible way of looking at things. There are a bunch of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) our backroom staff and analytics team look at every game and in every training session for each of our players and how our team performs. It's absolutely amazing to see the kind of stuff data analytics teams do in sports today. The problem is that the parameters of a dynamic game, like football, aren't as cut and dry as other games (like my coin flip/die examples above). How many times have you seen a team playing very well, only to lose a the game to a fluke goal? What about a big, expensive team barely beating a team with a fraction of their budget? What about a player who somehow manages to score 20 goals in one season, only to struggle to score 8 a season the rest of his career? The real art to this is that it takes time and lots of data to figure out if something is working consistently or not. If the manager chopped and changed the formation/line up/style of play every single time we lost a match, it would be impossible to figure out whether or not we're making progress week in and week out, or our results are down to just luck. Here is a counter to your example: We pulled out the 532 formation for the first time against Chelsea and we played very well, but still lost... By your logic, he should have done something else against Man United because we lost and it "takes too long for him to understand", but he stuck with it because the KPIs our backroom staff values showed favorably, despite the result against Chelsea. It paid off and we won at Man United, and played it again against Spurs. We lost that one and didn't play particularly well, but it was the first game with the formation where we didn't perform well, so they tried to tweak some things for the Wolves match. We blew a 2-1 lead from some individual errors, despite playing ok for most of the game. We went again against Arsenal and they ripped us apart. We didn't see enough progress in our KPIs over the past 3 games, so they changed back to a 433... Despite the result, we played better before the red card and there is more there for us to build upon going forward playing 433. My point is, hindsight is 20:20. It's easy to sit there and say he makes bad decisions over and over and over again and needs to chop and change things more quickly. If we didn't have a late game collapse against Wolves, or let in two very long range/low probablity efforts against West Ham combined with a soft red card, we'd be having a different conversation right now.

It's purely because he's not English Remember when there were a lot of people who wanted Henry over Smith? Same reason... Exotic and mysterious. I'd only swap Deano for one Portuguese manager, and that's Mourinho, someone who many on here called "past it" last season.

I doubt it... I still think you're overestimating the amount of Villa supporters who want Smith out.

Ok, so... He did that... He started playing 532 as a backup formation for 4231/433 and we had a lot of success when we first pulled it out weeks back. I keep seeing this "no backup plan" or "poor tactics/subs" as an argument against Smith all the time, but I also don't see the biggest clubs/managers making sweeping changes to their systems game to game, let alone within the game itself...

3 seasons ago, we were mid table in the Championship, we've improved every single season under Smith until this summer when we lost Jack, which seemed to catch everyone off guard at Villa. We knew this season was going to be one of transition, and no matter how optimistic some were about our chances to challenge for Europe without Grealish were, it was always going to be a very tough ask. Our season's publicly stated goals in interviews with Smith are to improve on our finish from last season (11th) and get the team to play and win without Jack. We're 10 games into the season and we're missing on both those goals, but we've dealt with a COVID-caused shortened preseason and one of the worst injury crises of all time. That said, as poor as we've been, there are still 5 teams playing worse than us and Smith has proven he's been able to turn around poor runs of form before during his previous 3 seasons with us. It's too early to call for his head right now.

I didn't agree with the Young substitution, but I get the thought process behind it (having a veteran on the pitch vs throwing a 19 year old in Chucky or A. Ramsey in off the deep end). Buendia's substitution was a result of the red card, not because of his performance. Bailey's pace was valued over Buendia's passing when we were down a man. Who should he have taken off instead? A central midfielder? Bailey? No, Buendia was the logical choice. What fall out? More Twatter speculation... I'm not going to beat anyone over the head for that. Yeah, and Mings got the message. Was benched for poor performances, and looked much better when he came on after the red card. 4/5 losses - "Results-Oriented Thinking" at it's finest... We've also went on winning runs on Smith's watch over the past 3 seasons too.

That performance was poor, but West Ham's first two goals were statistical anomalies (XGs of 0.12 & 0.04 respectively). The soft red card didn't do us any favors, but there are a lot of positives to take from this performance: Smith stopped playing 532 He benched Mings for poor performances He started Bailey Ollie found the net again Buendia looked like a good player in his actual position (on the right in a 433) and got an assist (MOM for me)

Young way out of position for that one... Not a CM... Should never have been brought on to play there...

About fooking time. Get in there!!!

Did I say it was our fault? We're definitely not helping the situation, though...

Yeah, you're right. Telling the team that you can't go travel home when your dad is in the hospital will do wonders to boost morale instead. Unbelievable.

This... We're awful to our own players... Groaning every bad touch or pass backward. I haven't seen VP's atmosphere this bad since our relegation season.