JPJCB

Bold prediction but it’s the new year so I’ll do it.
 

We’re gonna finish third. That’s based on us continuing our 2023 form through the rest of the season which would see us with 80 points and would have resulted in a third placed finish in each of the last 5 seasons other than one (when it would have resulted in second).

This is how I reckon it will finish:

1. Liverpool

2. city

3. villa

4. Spurs

5. Arsenal 

6. Utd 

7. Brighton 

8. Saudi FC

9. West Ham 

Konsa for me- has stepped up as a leader in mings’ absence and performed very solidly including a significant number of games out of position 

1 minute ago, LondonLax said:

He’s only 21 though so pretty good to be the stand out player in a top 10 side. 

He’s been better than I expected but with two caveats. 1.) Every single time I saw him for city he looked absolute dogshite- absolutely miles off the level of the first team so I’m still unconvinced that he’s actually as good as he appears for an average Chelsea team. 2.) it’s a pisstake that a couple of good appearances for one of the “big 6” gets you an England call up and he should be having to prove himself more before getting to international football.

All in all though he’s benefitted from the move 

Palmer is exactly what the facts show he is- a decent, if not spectacular, player in a mid table team. It just happens to be the case that the team in question is Chelsea and as a result people assume he must be brilliant and he gets England call ups when actually it’s really not that difficult to standout in their very average first eleven

Rice looked like he slipped there. Did they overwater the pitch? 

12 minutes ago, JAMAICAN-VILLAN said:

No one is saying anyone can't point out someone having a bad game, multiple have already done so, in multiple threads.

The point is more that some have decided that he's suddenly not as valuable as once thought, due to one performance last night. Lol

I don’t know why you think this is such a laughable view? Yesterday was a big big game that we bottled at least partly due to a very poor performance from the player we’re discussing. It seems really odd to me that you wouldn’t take that into account in the value of a player. Before yesterday I didn’t think Luiz would go missing in big games. Now I think it’s quite possible that he could. Now of course that needs to be balanced against his performances to this point, but your view amounts to saying we should just ignore what happened yesterday entirely 

6 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

As I say, a player who *deserved* to cost £100m would be one of the best 20 or 25 players in the world. The likes of PSG, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Man City would be competing with us. I know we've had a good half a season but we're not going to be beating those clubs to signings yet, if ever.

Let me pit it another way. If you emerged out of a bottle in a puff if smoke and asked me if I would swap Luiz for Rice while changing nothing else about the world, I would say yes. But if we'd bidded the same amount as Arsenal last summer Rice wouldn't have even entertained the idea of joining us. 

The missing piece of logic there of course is the suggestion that Luiz is worth £100m in the first place which is the thing we’re actually debating. If you assumed he was worth closer to £70-£80m which might be fairer value since he’s had only 12m playing at the top form he has been recently then signing a CM to replace him doesn’t look as difficult. Not easy by any means but if we’re going to be part of the big leagues which is our aspiration then we have to be in those races. Hopefully if we have CL football it makes it a lot easier.

I note as well that the structure of your argument would basically apply regardless of any fee that we received for Luiz. If we received £500m for him we’d still face the exact challenges you’re talking about. So your argument isn’t “don’t sell Luiz because he’s worth more to us than the fee we’d get for him”; instead it’s “don’t sell Luiz because we’ll never ever be able to sign a replacement in any circumstances”. That might be true but is overly pessimistic and just isn’t sensible in an FFP world. To take grealish as an example, I think most posters today would say we’ve done ok out of that deal but very few would have on the day of the deal itself. £100m is a hell of a lot of money

Just now, HanoiVillan said:

That's fine, but note you're changing your argument. Your initial argument was 'with £100m we could buy a player just as good or better', which there's no reason to believe. Now you've changed to essentially 'selling Luiz for £100m might not be a disaster and might even enable better squad building' which is more defensible but not the same argument. 

You’re right the second argument is stronger. I haven’t fully abandoned the first though. There are plenty of situations where the buying club overpays for a player whether that’s stupidity (Chelsea going for caicedo) or a title aspiring side feeling they are the missing piece of the puzzle (arsenal going for rice). It would obviously depend on the exact situation which is the case. But I don’t think it’s outlandish to say that we could get a player as good as Luiz or better for a monetary equivalent of the third most expensive player in history.

This initial debate started because people accused a fellow poster of having a kneejerk reaction by saying that selling someone for £100’ might not be a bad idea which is just bad logic to me 

8 minutes ago, JAMAICAN-VILLAN said:

So you've moved into that camp because of his poor game in a depleted midfield last night where the whole team was poor?

Does this eliminate all his other world-class showings?

If it was as easy as some are suggesting to get a player just as good or better for 100 mill, why wouldn't the offering club just go for that player instead?

I personally took a long time to become a fan of Doug... But this is beyond kneejerk.

When the facts change, I change my mind? Is that tricky to understand?

Much the same as you I was unconvinced by Doug for a long time and it’s the last 12 months that he’s proved me wrong. Even now I don’t think he’s a bad player by any means but last night showed me that he isn’t a leader. When the chips are down you want players to step up and want to get on the ball and take control of the game- the opposite of what Luiz did. Apparently it’s kneejerk to say that I now think accepting a £100m fee for him- a fee that would make him the third most expensive player of all time- might not be a bad idea. Ok then? 
 

Im less pessimistic than you are about our ability to find a decent replacement. We found Kamara for a free transfer and how much would you say he’s worth now. Or we could spend £50m on two very very good midfielders (if not as good as Luiz) which would solve our depth problem in that area 

It was Martinez that created the conditions for a situation like that to happen with Kamara. Kamara was naive but I genuinely believe that could have happened to a number of our other players caught in the melee- it was pretty innocuous. If you were out with your mates and that happened you’d be blaming the idiot friend who kicked it all off not the one who did something as minor as what Kamara did .

What’s worse is that Unai knew that it meant trouble and was desperately trying to drag Martinez away (not Kamara) to which Martinez was pathetically fighting against. He needs to realise that being a moron who causes trouble isn’t the same as having a winning mentality 

9 hours ago, JAMAICAN-VILLAN said:

Yeah I'm not going to relegate him to " I'm ok if we get rid " status due to one lacklustre performance lol

I think the point is that with £100m you could buy a player just as good or better

Aftwr last night I’ve moved more into that camp personally. Luiz hid all game which was shameful.
 

For me our highest priority position for a big signing is now centre midfield since we’re thin on the ground there anyway (only Kamara and Luiz are starting XI quality) and they could both do with decent competition

Just now, Stevo985 said:

He's absolutely one of the reasons we lost.

Really? The reason we lost is lack of control of the centre of the pitch. Jacob didn’t offer much but he didn’t do any less than Bailey in that respect. This loss is on Luiz and dendoncker who failed to show any kind of control and his all game. If we’d played the same but with a peak Ramsey we still would have lost. If we’d played the same but with a peak Luiz then we wouldn’t have 

Shameful shameful performance and simply laughable we think he’s anywhere near a £100m player. He hid all game which is just embarrassing. If I was Emery I’d be livid 

Didn’t play great but he’s not the reason we lost 

Really **** pissed off with that tbh and it’s the first time I’ve rated an emery performance as a “poor”.

Manure’s one strength is playing on the transition and we allowed them to play the game that way despite being in the lead for most of it and being in a position where we should have been able to absorb pressure. There’s a mitigating circumstance that we’re missing both Kamara and Torres (the loss of the former by that Brentford red card is turning out to be a big big miss and something that Martinez should be throroughly embarrassed about given his role in it) but still the gameplan needed to be to drop deeper an absorb their press which we didn’t do. Conceding three goals to these lot is an embarrassment.

Martinez- 7- I don’t think he can be blamed for any of the goals

konsa - 8- Motm- the only leader on the pitch

carlos- 5- looked positionally suspect on a few occassions

lenglet- 6- not terrible considering but lost the ball in dangerous positions

digne- 6- was fine but Moreno outshone him when he came on 

dendoncker- 5- decent in the tackle but contributed to lack of control

luiz- 3- ill drive him to arsenal myself on that performance. Numerous occasions teammates looked for an option in the middle and he was nowhere to be seen. He was being marked closer than usual but made no effort to move into space. The opposite of leadership

mcginn- 5- looked good every now and then on the ball but influenced the game too little. Should probably have been dropped a bit deeper once our lack of control in the game became apparent

ramsey-4- I’d drop him for diaby based on current form and ease him back in via cup matches 

Bailey-5- similar to McGinn. Decent when on the ball but influenced the game too little

watkins- 3- didn’t do anything of note which isn’t really good enough for a striker with his ambition 

I cannot believe how much Luiz has hidden in this game. So many times when a player has tried to look for a pass into the centre of the pitch and he’s just nowhere to be seen 

Both the “second eleven” players (dendoncker and lenglet) have been very good considering. And great to see them create a goal.

Manure rely on playing on the transition and so it’s frustrating that we’re not exercising more of our possession game. We need to see a bit more from Luiz 

7 hours ago, villa4europe said:

Get the **** out of it, TAA missed, rice did absolutely nothing 

The whole narrative around rice has become silly. Arsenal were statistically better last season at this point and their only big money addition has been rice so why haven’t they’re significantly improved? He’s not performing badly by any means but £100m should be getting you a player that transformatively improves your team (a la Van Dijk at Liverpool) and he simply hasn’t done that 

4 minutes ago, ozvillafan said:

Right culprit, wrong rat.

It was Saka at Arsenal. Who'd have thought?

Ah right you are 

Didn’t mings do something similar to salah a couple of years ago? Slid in and go the ball and then because of salah’s movement and mings’ momentum clipped the man after? 

I do think there’s a lack of people paying attention to what Emery has actually done. Neville there talks about us finishing top 4 in the same way someone who’d not watched football for 18 months and then was asked about us finishing the top 4 would- “oh it’s Villa who aren’t a traditional top team so probably they won’t finish in the top 4 but wouldnt it be nice if they did”

If you look at what has happened under emery where we’ve been consistently a top 3 level team in terms of points per game, plus the fact we already have a head start, it’s gonna take a relative collapse in our form under emery for us to drop out of top 4. From that perspective I’d be “surprised” if we didn’t finish top 4 at this stage 

1 hour ago, RicRic said:

Amrabat no chance, if i didn’t think he was nowhere near good enough for them at the time of signing then he's not good enough for us… not sure how players like that are ending up at United but im all for it … at the moment Cash, zaniolo and as it stands JJ are our weakest points in the team so we should be looking at bringing in someone for at least one of those positions

But…but…didn’t he tackle Mbappe once in the World Cup? 

2 hours ago, turnbull said:

Language barrier? Nobody can understand the Scouse clearing in the woods! 

I don’t know what you mean…

1 hour ago, PaulC said:

Yes but the other two games we should really win without him.  So not all bad really and he gets a rest.

Also, Manure’s main (of many) weakness(es) is their non existent midfield so it’s not quite as bad as losing him against a similarly ranked team but with much better midfield (e.g spurs, Brighton)

22 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

In fairness @Vive_La_Villa, you asked the question. 

Then this -

So what is the optimal amount of time that an injury has to be for you to consider it an issue? 

You must see that your argument is nonsense? By your rationale a team can “count” themselves unfortunate for a month long injury to a player but can’t feel likewise for a season long injury.

“Sorry Jurgen, Salah is out for 6 months. Don’t worry, could be worse, it could have been a fortnight.”

I seem to recall Van Dijk being out for months and it being used as an excuse for Liverpool’s woes. Are we not allowed that?

I don’t think we have to remind ourselves EVERY game that those two are injured, but like I say, you did ask the question.

“Tell us then Pep, how bad is the injury to Haaland?”

”we’ve got the medical report in and it’s the worst we could have all feared: a 24 hour stomach bug. It’s a tough one but we’re all here for Erling and we know he’ll come back stronger”

”and what about KDB?”

”oh that’s just a broken leg. I’m sure he’ll shake it off within the next 18 months and we’ll be happy to see him back”