leighavfc

Agreed Garde hasnt really impressed but the bloke has inherited a squad of players that he signed none of, he may not rate any of them but they are the only players he can put out in each game. I will give him until the end of the season at least and review from there. The players are the problem, many of them been here for years and been the same. Its no coincidence that our best players are 1 or 2 players signed in the summer. The foundations of the team are crap, many of the new ones being just as bad so far. I think if we go down he should be able to have a go in the summer providing the results pick up a bit between now and then.

WBA ? they normally give us a win in the second half of each season to help us towards safety? although im not convinced it will happen this time

The communication from the club to fans is poor but that doesnt mean the fans should act in this way. I think the point about sacking or disciplining the players for smiling or laughing is well OTT imo. Ask yourself this, if some bloke was shouting the same at you how would you react? I know i wouldnt be as pleasant...Them smiling or laughing is them showing how pathetic the bloke sounds shouting all the rubbish he was aiming at them. IF he was shouting something a bit more constructive and they reacted like this then absolutely the players would be wrong. but not in this case...

Does anyone think Garde is getting fed up of the Villa already? Some of his comments after the game suggest so to me after reading them.

The only "F*****g w****r" in that video is the bloke shouting it..... I can agree with giving the team a bit of stick when warranted like at the moment but to verbally abuse people like that is just plain stupidity.

As much as i hate to say it, you are probably right. I wouldnt normally agree with a defeatist atitude of accepting relegation now but at the same time when do we get to the point of being blind to our situation? We are probably another defeat or two from having no more hope of survival. Its a complete sad state of affairs for a club of our stature, (admittedly a long time ago now). We must try and sign as many top level Championship players as it is possible now and bed them in now ready for next season. Players like Afobe, Byram, Marshall and the likes should be top of our list along with maybe getting in a couple of quality loans that may improve our squad enough to give us a millescule of a chance, which unfortunately i think is very unlikely indeed.

Didnt Fox say a new chairman was soon to be appointed ? if so where the f**k is he?

We must spend some money this window, the question is how do we spend it? Do we do a QPR and try and buy our way out of trouble which is very risky but imo is the only way we will have any chance of staying in this league, providing we do it wisely and not like QPR did it. Or do we accept relegation, and buy in preperation for the championship. Imo we need a bit of both and just hope to hell a miracle happens and we get results. On the other hand i have no faith in the board to know what they are doing if we go down as they have been so inept at every single decision they have to make over the last 5 years. Having no football knowledge on the board has absolutely crippled us.

I said like a few others on here did 2 months ago that Kozak should get a chance, did far more against sunderland in his 10 mins on the pitch then gestede has done for the last 3 games at least. How he doesnt get on as sub is beyond me. He must be given a chance to start ahead of Gestede, yeah hes not the most mobile player ever but he is far more mobile than Rudy is. He has a knack of being in the right place at the right time. Hes not a world beater but you cant coach someone being in the right place at the right time, the four goals he got before he broke his leg were from the strikers instinct he has.

not sure mate, but something has happened between the two because iirc he hasnt been in many of Garde's squads. i dont think he has been in any squad over the last month at least tbh

As bad as he has been the past few years, i think he should have been on the bench today. As KSV said he cant be as bad as Sinclair or Gestede. We may aswell play with 9 men when these 2 are on the pitch. I know Gabby isnt great but he will have at least one good game a season. A game like today would have been good for him imo. Bring him on for the last 10 mins and at least frighten the defence with his pace in behind, making there defence drop deeper and giving us more time in midfield. Him and Garde must have had a big bust up for him not to be anywhere near the bench today.

i disagree the problem for Gil is he has no one intelligent enough to make a run or move in to space for him to pass too. This results in him having to go it alone, and with him being lightweight this normally results him getting knocked off the ball and lose posession. This happens week in week out for him, if only we had a striker that could make runs in behind the defence instead of the statue called Gestede.

did anybody apart from Gil and Ayew actually bust a gut and try to get us back in front? No urgency no fight nothing from the rest of them. absoultely shocking that these "players" get paid thousands of pounds each week when they have less desire than your average sunday league player

to put it simply we are F****N S***E. Absolutely clueless all over the park.Gestede is about as mobile as a tortoise. defence looked shaky every time ball was anywhere near our box. Only Gil had a decent game in midfield and yet gets taken off. Penalty was a lil harsh but would have been a foul anywhere else on the field to be fair. I would seriously accept half decent offer for these bunch of bottlers.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/doomed-aston-villa-lining-up-7122367 Yes its the mirror but if this really is the case then i would not be expecting much if anything this window.... Mind you i dont know what my expectations for the club are any more! Incompetence?

Yes i agree it makes perfect business sense. Prepare for all outcomes. Yes the player in question is in 25 man squad but not a "regular starter". Is part of the squad who will probably take us down, so again i agree they should suffer the consequences as all of us would if we performed poorly in our jobs.

Yeah it does but i would also say that it must be hard to make this kind of decision as the football club must be prepared for any situation which is correct (villa being prepared is a shock in itself!!). but then on the other hand the message it kind of sends out is we expect to be fighting relegation during your contract. Kind of a double edged sword really. i wonder if any potential signings have been put off by this in the past?

i know of one player who has a 50% relegation wage clause. i imagine there are more if not all who have signed contracts in recent years will have this clause aswell. definetly the right thing to do but as someone said earlier just shows a lack of ambition really.

A lad i have known for years has recently just been released from prison, he had mobile phones, drugs and bottles of ciroc whilst in prison. He was posting videos up on facebook constantly! As much as i agree in the rehabilitation of offenders, i also believe that giving them playstations and luxurys like that is beyond a joke really. TV's i can agree with but that should be about it.Why are they getting rewarded for bad behaviour on the outside? There are lots of kids whos moms and dads cant afford to buy them stuff like this, yet prisoners are getting them handed out for so called good behaviour in prison. This for me is a big reason people think that prison is a joke. Of all the people i know who have been prison, only 1 is on the straight and narrow and has actually learnt a lesson from it so to speak. The rest either fell back into what they were doing before or moved on to worse things. Im sure there are many good cases that come out of prison but on the whole i dont believe these people are regimented enough. Like someone said earlier its a bit like school for a lot of prisoners. This is all based on people i know or hear from others. I just think we could be a little bit harsher on them.

This is exatly what i have been thinking for years, the war on drugs is actually just causing a war on the streets as gangs and dealers fight for territory. Even all the former drug advisers, (who all quit a few years ago about something the government went against their advice or something along them lines) say that this will be the only way to control the whole drug problem.

Agree with everything you say there mate. Yeah i must ask my missus family their views on London next time as i would be very interested about what they think, they do visit London a lot aswell so would be very interesting. They live in Romsey which is about 7 miles outside of Southampton so they dont really understand living in a big city like ours i suppose. Yep this kind of stuff doesnt really effect people who are not involved with gangs an drugs etc but then you do get the occasional case of mistaken identity or wrong place wrong time thing. I would also say that it doent neccessarily just affect people and familys involved, i would also say communities get affected. Older people may well think twice about doing stuff if there has been a shooting or a stabbing near by recently for example. A lot of these crimes are limited to certain areas a lot of the time but as proved over xmas they can happen almost anywhere. I worked in Handsworth/Winson Green for over 10 years and although there were a couple of times where i nearly got robbed/mugged, i never actually did. There were also 2 incidents where i was just a matter of yards away from guns going off on 2 occassions which was very scary as i heard the gunshots go off. The worst one was when i actually witnessed a carspeed up the road stop then shots being fired from the car at a house. When i walked back to work from the shop there was like 5 bullet holes in the window. Frightening really when you think i could have been in that position if i had left work a few seconds earlier. i have also just read another article on the bham mail about the recent surge in violence which is here :http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/three-murders-triple-shooting-seven-10684400

i have some links to the recent gun and knife problems. no facts as such but frightening reports of frequency of these incidents recently which is what my original post was about. this was just between october and november. not including the rest of november and the whole of december. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/six-birmingham-shootings-31-days-10436623 this one shows that over the last 10 years gun crime has dramatically fallen. which again is what i thought. But 513 incidents in just 12 months between april 14 and march 15!! https://www.west-midlands.police.uk/keeping-you-safe/behind-the-badge/guns/index.aspx Again is what i thought but doesnt cover the period of time in my original post. There are no stats as of yet for the recent period i have talked about. The first article says it all for me really.. 6 shootings in 31 days, that cant be amywhere near a so called normal rate of these incidents. Without stats i cant prove to be right or wrong but i am pretty sure that when the stats are released then the last 2/3 months will show an increase. Just searching on birmingham mail for guns and knives throws up at least 5 incidents in the last week!! And thats just what they have reported. You only have to do a quick search to see how many there have been of late.

Ive just read that yesterdays shooting in handsworth was actually a triple shooting....

No facts or figures but there seems to be a hell of a lot more of it being reported. Especially over the last 2-3 months or so. Its just terrible opening paper or watching news and reading about these incidents so close to home all the time.

I am posting this tonight after another shooting in the city today, this time its in Handsworth. The amount of stabbings and shootings that are happening at the moment is shocking. Its bad enough when anything like this happens, but of late there seems to be at least a stabbing or shooting in north birmingham every day. If you include the last couple of months, there are many more of these kind of incidents. Now i know about the big gang problems in Aston and Handsworth etc but a lot of this had died down in the past couple of years and wasnt as bad as it had been over the years. It seems like it may be starting to kick off again which is really bad news, it just makes you wonder how many guns are on the streets of Brum these days, or how many people are actually carrying knives. I suspect it is a hell of a lot more then figures given by police etc Even down my local on xmas eve there was a stabbing of a young man, i was only in there with friends the night before. Its just terrible, i have young kids and it really does worry me that things could be starting to get bad again. I thought we had seen the back of the majority of it over the past few years. There has also been a lot of people killed in random acts of violence over xmas. Seriously what is wrong with people these days, cant people go out and have a drink and be merry anymore? I know it only takes one person to do something, but it just seems no matter where you go now there are always dangers of violence or even worse. Especially over the few days before xmas and after, there were at least a stabbing and shooting in 2 days in and around the area of Great Barr i live in. There were probably more incidents that havent even been reported. I love this city but things like this really tarnish our reputation as a city to visit, my missus has family down south and they just think birmingham is a massive city run by gangsters running around eveywhere. It annoys me that they think like this but how could they see it in any other light with the amount of bad news this city has reported on a regular basis. Im not even sure what the police can do about this unless they can get hold and track the people down with weapons, which on its own is a job and a half. I hope to god things settle down soon. Another sad day for Birmingham