VillaAndLoyal

Who? Clark. Feel better now?

Clear penalty, stupid from Clarke, and entirely avoidable. Not a clear penalty at all. It was never a penalty in a million years. Walcott had kicked the ball too far in front of himself before the tug from Clarke, there was also a covering defender who would have clearly reached the ball before Theo had the shirt pull not occured and, thus, it was never a penalty kick. Foolish thing for Clarke to do, granted, as it gives substandard referees like tonight an easy mistake to hide behind. But, having watched the incident from several angles, it was definitely not the right decision. If there was a penalty, it was the one later on when the ref bizarrely booked the brilliant Van Persie for "diving" even though he clearly got taken out. Poor game from the referee.

Absolute rubbish. Are you forgetting that amazing sequence of wins we achieved playing 4-5-1 with Gabby up front a couple of seasons ago? We couldn't stop winning, especially away from home. Clearly some people have short memories. Gabby didn't have his best game today, that much is true. But people saying he was "awful" and "dire" etc are completely over-reacting. He would have had a goal in the first half but for a cracking save from the Arsenal keeper and his general link-up play with N'Zogbia was good. He is clearly at fault for the second goal, but then again I tend to think when the ball is crossed that close to the six-yard box Guzan should command his area and come out for it. Gabby has, mostly, been our only good player this season and it's disappointing to see so many of you forget that with one below-par performance. I thought that was our best performance of the season tonight, and we still lost. Worrying times. On the plus side, I don't think we missed Bent in the slightest - Marc showed him how to finish. And N'Zogbia had his best game for us. Encouraging signs in terms of the pressing, I just hope we play the same team and lineup against Stoke.

His attitude pisses me off something rotten. Always looks really **** off, he's lazy, his body language is atrocious and some of the chances he's missed this season my nan could have converted. He needs to get his act together and stop acting like a sulky child. We pay him enough.

He did play very well today. Would have had an assist if our 'star striker' could finish sitters.

The Beehive away pub made its feelings very well known about what they think about our manager today. He's on borrowed time.

And "You should have gone Christmas shopping, gone Christmas shopping!!!" Massive win. My MOTM goes to Albrighton, narrowly from Petrov, and I am so pleased to see him have a good game again finally. He's had a torrid 12 months or so after a blistering start and it was great to see him back on form. Should be a massive confidence boost for him, and the team collectively. Villa fans were excellent and the singing at the barmaid in the Beehive pub before the game was so funny! Also, a whole away pub singing anti-McLeish songs is very ominous.

How incredibly ironic that post is! Considering you, not long ago, last season to be presise, said you wouldn't actually mind if we were relegated from the best league in the world. Same mentality, no?

McLeish is about as popular as the plague, and rightly so.

Off to Bolton. All negativity forgotton about. C'mon you Villa boys!!!

I can play the bongo drums?

Got mine. Hopefully we manage a shot against Bolton. It would be nice to think we could.

Sorry, was that meant as a joke? :?

The ground holds over 12,000 and with the increased FA Cup allocation we should be entitled to around 1,800 tickets. Great draw, in my opinion, another ground ticked off the list! And we could well be in a standing terrace as well!

I'm sorry, you are entitled to your opinion, but in my opinion that whole post is a load of rubbish. Full of inaccuracies, assumptions and contradictions. Firstly, you state most of what he has done/is doing is for the benefit of the club. How? What has he done? The only example you go on to offer, about him "trimming" the wage bill, is not even a plus point anyway. He is merely trying to correct an irresponsible three years of chucking money into anything and everything in a wholly unsustainable way. We laughably had a wage bill (80m+ a year) greater than that of Tottenham Hotspur, a team many are now backing to challenge for the title. A team full of quality and bargain purchases. Our team consisted of Steve Sidwell and Habib Beye (among others) on £40,000+ a week and not even playing. This is why, when people say: "Oh, Lerner had a good first three years and it is only now going a bit pear-shaped" I say, "rubbish!" It has been going "pear-shaped" from the moment he walked into this club, only now are we seeing the results. It is a mirror image to this country's financial problems. We spent irresponsibly for a period of time and now we are paying for it in the long-run. Who was responsible for this chronic mismanagement? Randolph Lerner. Nothing he has done at this football club thus far suggests he is a sound businessman, absolutely nothing. Even selling our best players, whilst providing short-term cash investment, could be seen as foolish in the long-term because who knows where we could have finished with this additional quality? Most of the current England team is made up of former Villa players, after all. So the fact you state Randy is a "sensible" owner in a financial sense is quite utterly laughable, in my opinion, he is so far from sensible it isn't even funny. The strange analogy you make about us ending up like Portsmouth FC is based on no evidence or facts whatsoever. Pure conjecture designed to scare people. We 'could' also end up like Man City or Spurs, by your very same logic. The fact he didn't hire Alex McLeish on the cheap and paid our biggest rivals so much compensation for a manager no-one wanted is just an extension and further evidence of his reckless spending. Pumping dead money into completely illogical ideas. I think you have some sort of opinion that the reason people want him out is purely because he has reigned in his spending? If so, you are completely missing the point. You say we have kept ticket prices low, then later in the same sentence talk about increased season-ticket prices this season, in doing so completely invalidating any sort of point you were trying to make. Ask Wolves or Albion fans whether we have kept ticket prices at the same price this season? We haven't. Our season tickets were bumped up and if that "better package" you are talking about is the free pie vouchers and free subscription to a channel many never watch anyway, then again I can only laugh. Since he has been at this club, he has: - Appointed non-footballing people to help run a football club. Paul Faulkner was previously 'Relationship Manager' at MBNA - how has working with credit cards for five years mean you have the skills to work as an effective chief executive officer at Aston Villa Football Club? He has no footballing background, clearly knows nothing about football (like Lerner) and was a completely illogical choice. To the people saying Faulkner is the problem and needs to go - who appointed him? Yes, that's right, good old Randy. - Spent recklessly and unsustainably from the start, sanctioning crazy transfer and wage deals, as already mentioned further up. I don't need to go into any further detail on that. - Appointed two thoroughly awful managers. Not the three some people are suggesting, as it was Doug Ellis who installed Martin O'Neill as manager under assurances that Villa would imminently have a new owner. The first manager he appointed was clearly not fit to return to work, following major heart troubles in recent years, yet we still offered him a medium/long-term contract regardless of the financial risks and ended up losing more money when the inevitable materialised. Another chronic mismanagement in terms of investment. This manager, Houllier, also turned us into a laughing stock on the pitch and largely started the feeling of apathy among many. His second appointment, Alex McLeish, was as nonsensical as it was foolhardy. There was not one footballing reason to appoint him on any level, in my mind. Again, this has been covered in great depth already and not many people fail to agree it was a massive mistake. A mistake we are still to see the true effects of. - Headed a club partaking in endless PR gaffes. Given the level of discontent it is clear that what the club is doing now to communicate with its fans isn’t working anywhere near as well as it could be. The club needs a public face. While the manager is undoubtedly the face of the product on the pitch, the club needs somebody on the business side of things to be the mouthpiece of the board who can articulate their fading vision. Randy Lerner is clearly unwilling to assume that role, while Faulkner and Krulak are unable to. Krulak tried on this very site, and ended up attacking the national media when they merely reported things he said to the fans on this public internet forum. More evidence of a hierarchy at Villa just completely out of touch with the responsibilities and realities of running a Premier League football club? Many would say, yes. No one doubts he hasn't done certain things well, like the training ground and Holte Pub refurbishment. But, in the grand scheme of things, these points are fairly insignificant. An owners two primary jobs will always be to deal with a club's finances and hire/appoint managers. He has not only failed, but abysmally failed on these two points on more than one occasion. If he had footballing people around him then I could hope these mistakes might be corrected, but he simply doesn't. He has failed on that, too. It is very interesting reading what Citizen Blue, a Manchester City fan, said as a neutral earlier in this thread. He said: This sums it up for me. He might be a really nice bloke, but that matters not when running a football club in the 21st century.

Would those eight people care to share why they would still back Alex McLeish? It all seems a bit quiet from the 'yes' camp. And please, try not to make it too obvious that you A.) are related to Alex McLeish, B.) are Alex McLeish, C.) are Randolph Lerner, General Krulak or Paul Faulkner, or D.) are one of the few Small Heath fans to have discovered the internet. If we lose or draw at the mighty Bolton Wanderers, I can see the spare bedsheets making a reappearance for our next home game. That's if anybody bothers to turn up, of course, as our players don't on a weekly basis.

Arguments, about what? It's almost universally agreed upon that McLeish must go. About the game, who should come on, arguments with stewards, arguments about the w*nkers running amok on the back row and jumping into other people's seats. Arguments about anything and everything. It happened at Swansea too in the second half, although that was a full-on fight, rather than an argument. I fully believe a lot of it is translated from the shit we have to watch on the pitch. Fans are getting so bored and frustrated that it is translating to the stands. That, and the fact we have some right morons who come to home games.

But Rodders, Randolph Lerner is almost a mirror image to this country's financial troubles at present. We (Lerner) spent uncontrollably for three or so years and this is the end result. He is clearly not a credible businessman, nor a Premier League chairman, nor a communicator in a position of authority. In fact, what the hell is he good at? Apart from deliberately misleading the fans with a PR team which have been caught out by the national media on numerous occasions over the last 12 months. He inherited all of his wealth and to be quite frank, it bloody shows. He hasn't got a clue how to run this club or spend his money. I could have "three good seasons" if I had his wealth, and spent it as carelessly. It was unsustainable and that, in itself, shows beyond doubt that Randy Lerner is so clearly and utterly wrong for this football club, or any football club for that matter. He poured money into this club at the start and the vast majority, probably me included, were blinded by the short-term excitement. But, in reality, Randolph Lerner has been a failure from the start. It is only now however, over the past 12/18 months, that the cracks have well and truly come to the fore. It's ironic that he bleated about 'Proud History, Bright Future' when all along, Mr Lerner has been irresponsibly wasting vast sums of money and not giving a second thought to the long-term stability of the club. If he had, we wouldn't be falling like a stone now. He also wouldn't have had to 'change his plan' so drastically in terms of spending. It is no coincidence that everything happening now at Aston Villa, has already played out across the Atlantic at his other little 'hobby'. Get him out. He is poison. No overreaction here, just a clearly formed judgement following the catalogue of comical errors he has made since taking over.

Looking at the poll, we have four bluenoses on this site, clearly. I never wanted McLeish, why the hell would I? And yes, that is partly because of his Small Heath connections. Obviously. But more so because he is a dreadfully inept manager. More than 16,000 Villa fans joined a protest page against this cretin just days after we were outrageously linked with him, and yet the board went ahead and made arguably the most ghastly managerial appointment in the history of the Premier League. What was the thinking behind it? There is not one single logical reason. People who went to the 'protest' got slated by fellow Villa fans all over the web and media, for taking a particular stance and action over something which means so much to them. Yes, some football fans can be very reactionary, too reactionary, at times. But, at the end of the day, those people are still part of the lifeblood of this club. Nevertheless, they got slated from all angles. I didn't go to that protest but one of my best mates did, and I can verify it was done out of sheer frustration, bewilderment and anger at the impending lunacy unfolding before us. It came directly after a season full of nonsensical decisions and embarrassing gaffes, so patience had already been stretched. At the time these 'protestors' were accused of turning our club into a circus, and embarrassing us in front of the nation. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But are they the group of fans who look silly now? Most definitely not, is the answer. And that is because all the many grave concerns about McLeish are being proven one hundred per cent correct, down to the very last detail. He was never qualified for this job. He was never wanted by the fans, as a vast majority. His position was untenable from the get go, as proven by our woeful attendances this season. And this ultimately lies with our clueless board, who appointed someone not fit for our club. I can scream until I am blue in the face about how shit McLeish is, but it is nothing a lot of us didn't already know long ago. McLeish is poison, but Lerner is the person who has administered that poison to this (once) great club. He is culpable, and it’s not the first time, nor the first major gaffe. If only more people had listened to the 'clowns' protesting against what was a disastrous appointment? Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be in the position we are in now. Lerner out! McLeish (obviously) out! – He should never, I repeat never, have been appointed.

Is this an April fool? The pitch is the least of our **** worries, jesus wept!

Silly free t-shirts being handed out at half-time, arguments breaking out all over the Upper Holte, little kids running riot on the back row, the game being played solely in our own half, the national media laughing at the state of our Club, a team unable to create a contest against the worst United side seen at Villa Park in years. Thanks for **** nothing, Lerner, you prick. Get the **** out of my club and take the two ginger clearings in the woods and the billy big bollock General with you! That is all.

What a pathetic question. I hope no-one gets seriously injured. But I would always back the fitness of a Villa player, over an opposition player, obviously. It doesn't matter who they are. You need to accept the fact he's gone and get over it. As for Young being a Villa legend, don't make me laugh. That word is used far too cheaply these days and insults the true legends of this club and game as a whole...

This, this and this. Have none of you any self respect? I would rather have Keith Lemon manage Aston Villa than that self-promoting cretin Martin O'Neill, the guy who left us up shit creek three days before the start of the season. I don't care what argument he had with Lerner, I don't care how the goalposts were moved, and I don't care whether certain players were growing restless with him. He should have shown some integrity and professionalism towards this great club. By walking out he stuck a big middle finger up to all of us, and some of you would have him back? His resignation was out of spite and designed to cause maximum damage to his former employers. He almost got us relegated last season, with obvious help from Houllier. I hate him.