Laughable Chimp

Well yes. We should want players who have played well to start and we should want players who play poorly to be dropped.

17.6 shots conceded per game after the covid break compared to 11.9 shots conceded per game before to be precise.

No. Look beyond the results and look at the performances. Can you honestly tell me with a straight face that our performances has been consistent? We've been out of sorts since the Burnley game and our points talley hides the manner in which we've regressed on the pitch. Our best performance since then was against Arsenal btw but even then we were pinned back for a lot of the game and its **** Arsenal. They're one of the most incosistent teams in the league. Meanwhile, we were poor against Southampton, poor against West Ham, poor against Brighton and now poor against Leicester. How many poor games did we have before the Burnley game? Relative to the amount of games we played, it's night and day/

He was shit but most of them were shit today.

https://www.whoscored.com/Matches/1485432/LiveStatistics/England-Premier-League-2020-2021-Aston-Villa-Leicester Biggest odd one for me in there is Elmo's rating but a closer look shows he has the highest amount of tackles and interception for us in the game. I was not impressed by any one of our subs tbh. I really do think the tactics and team has been somewhat found out and it's not really selection that's the problem.

That doesn't make any sense. So are we just barely going to play him this season because "he was signed with an eye for next season"? He's not some youngster or hot prospect, if he's good enough to play for us next season he should be good enough to be given a chance now.

Sanson must really not be impressive in training

I didn't expect Ramsey to be coming on. That's a surprise

Gonna call it. Smith is going to sub in Trez for El Ghazi. Sanson for Mcginn and Nakamba for Luiz. Edit: I forgot about Barkley. Sanson for Barkley then.

Targett decided to do his best Grealish impression in honor of him missing this game. Wasn't half bad too

Sanders?

The difference in ratings is actually pretty small, so any notion of "best player" is pretty marginal. I think the only real takeaway from that is that everyone on our team is playing like shit.

https://www.whoscored.com/Matches/1485432/Live/England-Premier-League-2020-2021-Aston-Villa-Leicester For anyone interested, here's whoscored's half time ratings so far.

Tbh, I don't think DS has ever considered the strengths and weakness of the opposition when picking his team. Same with subs too. It always feels like he is picking his best/favorite team in general without optimizing against particular opposition.

Probably because we aren't on the level of clubs like Liverpool.

Kind of want to get El Ghazi in there somehow, but I suppose its time we start Sanson.

I found one free kick goal scored for Barkley and Traore each but both happened a long time ago. As far as I can tell, Grealish and Luiz have never scored directly from a free kick at a senior level.

Among the right backs in the league who've played at least 500 minutes this season, he's only rated lower than Cancelo, Reece James and Wan-Bissaka according to whoscored.

They weren't very good chances. The first happens in about 22 seconds in the video. The second one wasn't even good enough to make the video. No reason imo to use chances created over expected assists. Although using that doesn't really change much. Every chance we had the game was either created by Barkley or he fired the final shot. It just so happened that we had like only 4 shots and none of them were anything close to good chances.

We are 4th in the league in terms of aerial duels won. We're not aerially shy.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Found it odd how high it was at the time but didn't look too much into it then. Let's see here. Seems like they recorded him as having 6 interceptions that game; twice more than anyone else on the pitch so it's probably that.

No, I'm not advocating on wholesale changes in the playing squad either. I'm beginning to suspect teams have found us out tactically. In that case chopping and changing the midfield isn't going to mean much. The changes have to be more structural than that.

I don't think our issues are down to the failings of any single player so I don't think replacing any single player with another is going to change much.

Man, I dislike this way of viewing a player. It makes it sound like your mind is completely made up regarding El Ghazi and it doesn't matter how well he plays or how many goals he scores. He's not a good player in your mind and he never will be.(barring an absolute insane run of form that will blow away all your preconceptions of him). I don't like looking at a player this way. For me, you're only as good as your last couple of games. A player can be shit in the past and still become better in the future. But if you're always holding their past poor form against them that you'd bench them the first chance you see of them faltering, they're never going to have the chance to prove that. You're never going to get to see whether the purple patch is indeed just a purplr patch or something more.