david-avfc

Great to have him back. With the new signing Carlos we don’t really need to rush him back from this point either so can make sure he is 100% right before starting. 4 good quality centre backs competing for game time now, it’s gone from a position of weakness to possibly a position of strength

He can sign a pre contract agreement but would still be a villa player until his contract expires in July 2023

Kaden Young looked lively today and then scored a cracking goal at the end. With the heat and it being a preseason friendly it’s hard to judge but was definitely one who caught the eye in a slightly underwhelming overall team performance

No one ever has criticised him for not being a world beater Everyone knows youngsters need game time to develop and are simply not going to be the finished article at 17 or 18 years old. But, if Chukweumeka was always planning on leaving, which based on this contract saga it looks like this is the case, then there was never any point playing him because we were never going to benefit from his development and quite simply we have better senior players in the squad who could have played instead. This is why his contribution on the pitch has rightly been criticised, because if there’s no development gain for the club he has to be better than Sanson, Luiz, Nakamba, McGinn, Ramsey etc to deserve game time and frankly he hasn’t demonstrated it on the pitch (although Sanson hasn’t done much either)

I don't mind if he wants to move on, other players have moved clubs at young ages and have been successful in doing so, particularly those moving to Germany in recent years. After all we signed Carney from Northampton Town anyway so we can't complain too much at him wanting to do the same thing again! But what does irk me is that it seems like the lad has been given preferential treatment to entice him to stay - all our other youngsters have been loaned out first, and none of them were given reasonable PL game time at the age of 17 - and it looks like we've wasted our time when we could have prioritised giving other youngsters game time, or just playing senior players and maybe picking up more points during the season in games like Leeds, Burnley or even Liverpool and Man City. It's not his fault as he's just playing the cards he's been dealt to the best he see's them, but for the club it seems like poor planning as this could have been foreseen well in advance as transfer rumours go as far back as 2 years with this lad. I would love us to continue to develop youngsters, hopefully Ramsey will be our next home grown superstar and will then hopefully be followed by the likes of Archer, Kesler-Hayden among others. However, the players we chose to bring through at the very basic level have to be committed to Villa, if we are committed to developing them. The point of the youth system is to improve the club in the long run, either through selling them for significant transfer fees or bringing them into the senior squad. If we prioritise developing youngsters who don't want to stay around for the long haul it is hard to see what the benefit is.

Crazy how some fans have such a vendetta against him for some reason

Yeah most of them I swear are managed by kids, well if they aren't I'd be pretty worried to be honest. The lad PGL is a reasonable follow as he looks at the data side of things so a bit different to the generic nonsense fan account. Villa Academy is also good for u23's / /u18's coverage. The rest can be binned off.

But according to the VillaTV interview when he gets announced he’s a lifelong Aston Villa fan and has always dreamed of living in Birmingham

I was going to post that I thought he died, but before posting I did a quick check and he’s still alive but retired after having some kind of cardiac arrest on the pitch in one game

We all know the impact John Terry had on the likes of Grealish (and by extension the impact of not having those types around beforehand). I think Young will be a great influence on the rest of the squad, and he can also slot in to a few positions if required, he's a useful utility player and I don't believe he's totally useless on the pitch - not like Micah Richards who was a busted flush for years before we finally got rid

Not going to get too bogged down on individual performances in our first pre season match, but saw Ashley Preece raving about him today, not so sure from me - he’s a very tidy player but didn’t show much cutting edge and either lacked the pace or the confidence to bust forwards on a few occasions when space opened up

A promising youngster isn’t going to improve on the bench, so this gives him the opportunity to go out to league 1 or 2 and play 30 or 40 real games not just kids games so he should come back twice the player. As for Young, he’s a versatile back up not sure we’d want to rely on him though. Think he’s probably only a year or 2 away from retirement but seems like a good senior pro to have around the dressing room for the youngsters and to set standards for the rest. This one just makes a lot of sense to me. A relatively inexpensive signing, will do a role in the squad, and as it’s a loan it leaves our options open if he impresses, or not

Makes a difference with a proper sports reporter doing the interviews, Michelle Owen who’s usually on sky sports. Better questions for a start and then able to ask good follow on questions to keep the conversation flowing rather than just following a list of inane questions like they usually do

Also because of the fact we got battered and it was the worst midfield performance of the season by a mile He wasn’t that bad individually in that game, but it was a shocking performance as a midfield unit and he was 1/3 of it, so rightfully that experiment wasn’t repeated. I don’t know what the issue with Sanson is, but two managers now haven’t fancied him and although he’s looked OK in cameos here and there he hasn’t really done anything to stand out. It’s up to him to win the shirt and he simply hasn’t done enough in the eyes of the manager, and I have to say I haven’t seen anything from him either, perhaps harsh given his lack of game time but I’m not clamouring to see more of him

I don’t know anything other than what’s on the official website, but it suggests the number of tickets were ringfenced separately for each tranche - otherwise they’d have stated more clearly that the second and third tranches were subject to availability only, and nowhere does it say it’s first come first served for the first tranche only. The point about the volume of tickets matching the number of invited fans is that if your name gets called up you’re guaranteed a seat if you take up the offer, not that all the tickets are being offered immediately to the first tranche. I assume each tranche initially was set out at a fixed number, and then any unsold tickets from the first tranche were rolled into the second tranche, and then into the third, and any residual ones from that rolled into an extra 4th sales window. On the AVFC Support Twitter it says tickets in this 4th group are subject to availability only which suggests they’re expecting to sell them all and they’ve slightly oversubscribed the numbers.

That journalists is a waste of space, fires off so many rumours eventually gets lucky on one or two which probably makes him seem reasonable, but most of his stuff is pure trash. He was pushing the Suarez links hard not that long ago, along with several others which never went anywhere in recent months

If only we already had a small but tenacious South American winger with good defensive stats

It’s a shame we didn’t loan him out last summer, as a full year under his belt in league 1 would have set him up perfectly for a stint in the championship you’d have thought. Seems like he did OK at Cheltenham so hopefully he can step up to another level. Another spell in league 1 would probably be far better than going back to the u23’s but would seem like a bit of a sideways step.

Probably needs a loan out to the championship for a season before he steps up to the senior squad, but another exciting talent

The "original" current badge under Lerner looked like a cat playing with a ball or something. At least they made it look a bit more like a lion in some of the subsequent changes

Yeah he was very poor in his first Premier League spell with Swansea, don't think he even got as many as 8 - not in the league anyway. Shows why some caution is needed with young Archer, hopefully he takes this preseason by storm but if not a full season in the championship is not the worst idea especially if we had the option of a January recall if needed

Think it's a case that he's probably been told how good he is by everyone at the club and all his hangers on which undoubtedly he will already have, friends, relatives, family friends, agents knocking at his door etc, and he probably believes the hype. Even Purslow said Carney is the best youngster in the country so if that's gone to his head no wonder he is maybe expected more, whether that's financial or playing time. On paper it's hard to see how there are many better options than staying at Villa, a known quantity for him who are committed to developing him, have one of the best youth set ups around and have proven with Ramsey that youngsters can make their way into the first team. If he's thinking about moving abroad then that's an interesting one for him as the likes of Bellingham and Sancho and the lad at Bayern who now plays for Germany have proven there is a pathway there instead. I think the club should have sorted this out one way or another ages ago, they should have said if you aren't committing to us, we aren't committing to you and send him back to the U18's until either he renews, or his contract expires or we got a big offer from somewhere else. I don't think he's done enough on the pitch to warrant starting more games and he's played a lot of minutes for someone just turned 18.

To which point telling everyone we were prepared is even more farcical!

I never really got the “prepared” thing, seemed a bit too boy-scout for my liking, and why wouldn’t a professional team be prepared anyway? It never seemed that unique or inspiring or anything to me, although I get that it’s use goes back a long time in our history

I get where you’re coming from but Chuk did get minutes at the end of the season when our season had petered out. Our form before that was pretty dismal around Feb time so throwing a player like Carney in would have been a major gamble as we were at risk of sliding down the table, and actually we did take that gamble just with Tim Iroegbunam instead who personally I thought did well and in my opinion contributed more than Carney in his spells