Rolta

1 hour ago, foreveryoung said:

I dont rate him as a coach like any Villa fan, but i doubt he cares, an who would. He'll get treated like royalty over there with probably a 6 million a year salary. Or should he go manage Wigan Atheletic in the championship. 

Repeated Post Edited. No need for me to say the same thing twice.

1 hour ago, foreveryoung said:

I dont rate him as a coach like any Villa fan, but i doubt he cares, an who would. He'll get treated like royalty over there with probably a 6 million a year salary. Or should he go manage Wigan Atheletic in the championship. 

It depends on whether he has sporting ambition or making a load of money from a dodgy country ambition and being complicit in all the controversy that's connected to it.

9 minutes ago, bickster said:

Oh, how did this get overlooked?

Guardian

That's the biggest financial failure in local government history.

Where is it in the news? If that had been say Liverpool or Manchester... I think we all know where that would have been in the media

Am I right in thinking it was in the "news"—the Daily Mail or something—a few weeks back, but they blamed it on the Lib Dems, who replaced the people who actually did it. It might have been something else. EDIT: I just had a search and it was written about, but if the headline was as I say, it seems to have been changed.

9 hours ago, TheAuthority said:

Do you remember about a month after he was sacked, he posted a video on his social media. He had edited together every goal he'd ever scored against Villa.

Call it a lack of professionalism, or immaturity or just being a tit. But that' hardly going to endear him to Villa fans is it? Especially after his disastrous spell as manager in which he seemed to divide the dressing room, cause animosity between the fans and the club and dissolve all of the good spirit and positivity that Dean Smith had created during his time in charge.

My word is this true? That's a shameful lack of class. What an idiot (if true). I already dislike him a lot because he was a charlatan blagging his way as a manager and destroying us in the process. I know it wasn't his fault he was offered the job, but still.

10 minutes ago, picicata said:

Not sure he has the footballing intelligence to play the role next to Watkins

What makes you say that though? He seems pretty on it every time I see him play.

30 minutes ago, Mazrim said:

Well, not that different (lately), they both play attacking midfield or midfield left / centre... sort of.

The hate is completely childish and irrational. I hate his duck face, his shit chav hair and the fact he always scores against us. 

Fair enough!

As for the positions, Emery obviously has a bit of a different system to most people that involves a Buendia/Bailey/McGinn/Ramsey playing with Watkins. Barnes would surely be put there—and it's the most obvious position that we could do with improving. We could do with more than one if we were really serious.

1 minute ago, Mazrim said:

Ramsey is a better player than Barnes though, isn't he? He's also one of our own and already at the club... and 3 years younger.

They play in different positions. I don't get the hate. He's always looked pretty great to me. He'd be an option to play with Watkins I'd imagine.

17 minutes ago, beachboys1 said:

none but if we start getting mostly them we could end up  with how wolves ended up

Well Man City have three and they're doing OK. We have zero, so three more then.

46 minutes ago, cheltenham_villa said:

 

I've  no interest in whatsapp banter, i just want people to have freedom to have open conversations without fear that they will become front page news.

I don't work in a political environment but I do work in a highly regulated one. I've been part of incidents where we were compelled to make whatsapp messages on personal devices available, it didn't sit right with me and I'm not comfortable with the slow eroding of privacy.

My issues are nothing to do with boris, I've heard he's making the messages available,  I'm just not comfortable with the precedent, I don't think it'd a good think for any future government.

Isn't this just a standard part of the legal process. 'Discovery' in the US—maybe it's called something different in the UK—'disclosure?'. Famously it's why we know so much about the conversations of the utter bullshitters that are Fox News, Steve Bannon etc. via the Dominion lawsuit. I guess in the past personal whatsapps weren't the standard way of communicating—when people might have had to give access to paper trails/letters/emails. In this case, whatsapps were used to conduct official business. I get that there's maybe a little informal banter in there too, but this stuff is the modern equivalent of official communication.

18 hours ago, useless said:

That will do, simple timeless design, doesn't look very exciting but often the designs that look wild new and exciting to begin with can age pretty badly and look quickly outdated, this new Villa badge has a lasting classic reliable feel to it, something that's always been there and always will be.

Understatement!

He always impressed me. 

1 hour ago, HKP90 said:

I had a conversation with Bing AI yesterday, and it swore blind that we were playing Liverpool this weekend. When I told it we were playing Brighton, it told me I was wrong. Even gave me (incorrect) dates.

Is AI programmed to believe it is infallible, or has it come to this conclusion by itself?

I've come to the conclusion that Chatgpt and Bard just chat shit. It might sound convincing, but under a bit of scrutiny it quickly seems to fall apart. 

32 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

In my early years as a programmer, our mortgage lender screwed up our payments schedule. I went in to the branch (the days when you could do such a thing), and the girl behind the counter basically did that Fast Show routine - "Computer says no". After I had pointed out the obvious mistakes on my printed statement, she got a bit flustered, and backtracked to "Oh, must be a computer error". At which point I gave her the spiel as per your post above - it's a human error. Now fix it. 

As we used to say: "I hate this damn computer. I wish to God they'd sell it. It never does what I want it to, but only what I tell it". 

Little Britain!

14 hours ago, nick76 said:

But…

she has a point…

She is an extremist equally as extreme as the ones trying to overthrow actual democracy. 

7 hours ago, EvilChameleon said:

NBC News is reporting that DeSantis will announce his run tomorrow on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk.

'Centrist" Elon Musk. There was a guy I went to uni with who became obsessed with Tucker Carsen. He said they were both centrists too. He'd done a lot of drugs. So many. 

Openly pining for a fascist dictator when he was 19—maybe he's grown out of it, but I like to like our players. He seems like a prick, and not in any good "we need a bit of backbone" sense.

He was quite negatively outspoken about Basque people too, yet Emery signed him for Arsenal, so maybe he's calmed down a bit.

2 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

I know we say its bad here but it seems spain is alot worse. 

For a big footballing nation like spain its completely unacceptable that they are not doing more 

I live in Madrid and Spanish people fall into racism way too easily. They came out of a dictatorship at the end of the 70s, they've barely been multicultural, and in so many ways they're about 20 years behind us. We do have our own dickheads though—and the dickheads in Spain are the exact same dickheads as in the UK. I think they have more of the racist type though—over-macho ignorant crap. There's a bit more status here in Spain found in just bullshitting your way through things and pretending you're 'the man', and a lot of the bravado manifests in souped up arrogance and over-asserted tribal bullshit. There are also a lot of actual, out in the open fascists, and apparently clubs like Valencia and Atletico are some of the worst examples. I played football last night, and the guy who served us in the bar often wears a legionnaires (Franco's fascist army) hoody. He was bitching about Vincius, no surprise.

I also have two fourteen year old students who consume endless racist shit on TikTok. 80% of the memes are racist. They play fascist songs thinking it's funny. I know fourteen year olds are pretty much awful, but I've had to call them out on this near enough constantly. Here when 14 year olds act out they roleplay as actual fascists. Some people don't grow out of it. Racism is normalised here, and again it's all from them showing off and trying to be macho. It's a nightmare.

I'm leaning on the 'macho' side of things a lot here, but there are female equivalents too. I just don't get exposed to it quite as much.

Not all of Spain is like this by any means. There are loads of great people, but it's heavily polarised and the pricks make a lot of noise.

5 hours ago, VillaChris said:

People keep saying this but how come West Ham finished 7th last season despite getting to SF of Europa league? They had to beat the likes of Sevilla and Lyon aswell so that was far higher quality opposition than what they've faced in europe this season.

The main reason imo West Ham have been so poor is their summer signings of Aguerd, Emerson Palmeri, Lucas Pacqueta, Scamecca and Cornet have either been injured or just not adapted quickly enough to the premier league. Their form in league has picked up with Moyes going back to the old guard of Antonio, Cresswell, Coufal etc.

If we make europe we'll be adding 4-5 no problem to this present squad so bar a terrible injury crisis I don't believe we'd be that stretched for players.

I said this—I wasn't paying any attention to them whatsoever. When we're a bit depressingly shit I barely look above us in the table. My bad!

Bring on the conference then!

15 hours ago, jjaacckk91 said:

107.5 minutes...

This was insane and absurd! I remember one game recently with loads of injuries and we got about 3mins of injury time that I don't think were even fully played.

21 minutes ago, djdabush said:

It's interesting that it's front page on the Mail on Sunday who would normally be desperately trying to deflect the story. I wonder if this has been leaked by someone senior in the Tories who has decided she has rocked the boat too much recently and they want an excuse to get rid.

They love it surely. This sets the acceptable line where you can criticise the Tories, being cheeky about a £100 speeding ticket—all the rest of the endless shitery is therefore OK.

8 hours ago, maqroll said:

Well, Emery is clearly enthusiastic about any route in to Europe, so I'm officially on the bandwagon. We can perish the thought of MON in Moscow once and for all and go win the damn thing.

Tbh, he looked as if he was about to cry from sadness in his post match interview. We'd given ourselves all the chances in the world to get the Europa League until that equaliser.

2 minutes ago, sne said:

That's where we have Emery who's a master at this while Wet Spam have Gollum.

Ah yeah but I think Villareal also suffered a little in the league at times while he was succeeding in the European cups.

5 minutes ago, Rodders said:

Perfect for squad development and getting used to two games a week.

It didn't work well for West Ham this season! I'm not saying we'd be that shit, but it's arguable that it it be a bit of a shame if our league form suffered just to play in the Conference.

I'd think more of it if there wasn't a group stage.