KentVillan

I hope you're right, but I think his lack of pace is something that's going to trouble him for the rest of his career. He looks good against lumbering target men, but I'm worried a quick, technical team like Chelsea will tear him apart. Agree on Vlaar, though.

Just wondering if anyone else thinks that Baker is a liability? I like his attitude, strength, and his aerial ability, but he seems to be lacking almost everything else you'd want of a defender - no pace, rash decision making, often in the wrong position, zero skill on the ball. He seems to be getting a free pass at the moment, and I just don't understand it when Bennett, Lichaj, even Vlaar get torn apart for their defensive performances. In the first half against Sunderland, Baker looked completely out of his depth. He did okay against Norwich because Holt and Hoolahan are the slowest front two in football. How on earth this guy is the answer at LB against big 4 opposition is beyond me. We seem to think he's some kind of Ivanovich. I'd hope that top of PL's list would be an experienced centre half, maybe even two. It's the one position where youthful exuberance doesn't get you anywhere.

Using the word retarded to describe anyone is nothing short of ignorant. Apologies, didn't think that through, and you're right. Sacking Lambert would be very very ill-advised.

On current form, they're definitely not the worst. The string of results needed for us to go down isn't out of the question. I think we need 1 more point to stay up, especially if Chelsea do another job on our goal difference. Over the course of 36 games in the league to date (granted, it`s 35 for them) only the 2 relegated teams have picked up less points. Why the hell are we so terrified of them? You talk about form too... why does their form get taken into account, but ours doesnt? Ours is better, remember? Nobody's ignoring our form. The point is that in recent weeks Wigan are the relegation battlers (besides us) you'd least like to face. Of course we can still beat them, but things would be much more comfortable if the Wigan game wasn't crucial. Edit: and check out the quality of the teams Wigan have outplayed in the last two weeks - Spurs and West Brom. Spurs are challenging for Champions League. When was the last time we outplayed a team of that quality? And don't say Liverpool.

The point is that it suggests the players weren't given sufficient instruction by coaching staff. I suspect Gaby isn't the only vain and somewhat idiotic player in the Premier League, and yet you don't see this happening to players at United, City, Chelsea, Arsenal, etc. because those clubs would never let it happen. You hear about Rooney or Michael Johnson, but never someone completely f--king up their physique with inappropriate fitness work. MON should have given his players training schemes, rules, etc. for the close season, and they should have been monitoring the players over the summer (just a simple meeting and weigh-in every few weeks would have put a stop to it). I just think it's really off the mark to attack Gaby for getting buff, and also for falling out with GH and AM. He clearly loves the club.

On current form, they're definitely not the worst. The string of results needed for us to go down isn't out of the question. I think we need 1 more point to stay up, especially if Chelsea do another job on our goal difference.

What I'm saying is that he bulked up a whole season before Houllier became manager (i.e. the summer before 09-10). GH may have told him to stop, but by that point it was too late. I remember Beckham and Owen both made similar mistakes (which is when Beckham lost the ability to beat a man), but nowadays it's very rare that a manager lets his players take personal responsibility for their fitness regimes. MON was too old school - didn't believe in squad rotation and clearly didn't bother with sports science post-1980. I think Gaby was one of the big victims of this, because physically he's a thoroughbred, one of the fastest players in PL history. We should have looked after him better.

No, it was at least a season before that. Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–10_Premier_League - check the results chart. It was the summer before this that Gaby got stacked.

I was there for that game against Wigan, opening match of... can't remember what season... when we got turned over by Rodallega. And in the warmup, my mate said to me "who's that?" and I wasn't sure, and then we realised it was the new Incredible Hulk version of Gaby. But that's the manager's fault. You can blame the player for getting fat, but it's up to the coaching staff to spot when the player is packing on too much muscle. MON was too old school, he dropped the ball massively. Someone should have had a word with Gaby. On the plus side, look how he fended Bassong off for our second goal today.

Sylla hasn't played in that position for us yet, though - he generally presses quite high on the right. I agree he looks like he could play there, but that's not how we use him. The only person I've seen play out-and-out DM for Villa in recent years is Ciaran Clark, but it would be a big shout for Lambert to bring him in now to do that. I think Ginko is right about other results going our way.

Did Gabby ever have the potential to be better than he is? For a man whose game is almost entirely based around pace and work rate, I think he's been as good as he ever could be. His attitude has only dipped when everything around him has been going tits up as well. MON never rested him, which was disastrous, and then he had to play under managers who either didn't rate his style of player (Houllier) or didn't have a clue what they were doing (McLeish). He's not the best player in the world, but he deserves the love.

Benteke actually played quite well, but we expect so much of him that he looked gash. The flick over his head to set up the soft left foot shot was class, as was the little lay off for Gaby that nearly resulted in a goal. I've noticed that every so often we come up against a team which has a player capable of matching Benteke in the air, and that was the problem today. But he played pretty well with the ball at his feet.

We only have one respectable result against top 5 opposition this season: 0-0 against Arsenal. I think there are three factors: 1. Lack of confidence 2. Top teams are much harder to hit on the break 3. We don't have anyone who can nullify an attacker sitting in the hole. Most mid-table and lower table teams don't have the luxury of such a player, but all the top teams have players who live in the gap between defence and midfield. The only thing that has changed recently is confidence. In the other two respects, you'd still expect Chelsea to have the advantage. I'm terrified of what Mata, Lampard, Hazard and/or Oscar will do to Westwood and Delph.

I love it when people criticise Lambert's substitutions, as though he has a bench full of world class talent. This man is a genius. Nobody else signs unproven kids from the Championship, League One, and Ligue 2 in France and turns them all into respectable PL regulars in less than a season. Sure, we make mistakes, and sure we might still go down, but it's no coincidence that Lambert has been booed relatively rarely this season, even when things were going badly. For fans starved of exciting football since the days of Merson, or maybe even Yorke, or maybe even the Big Ron team in 92, this season has been mindblowing. I think he could do with bringing in a defensive coach to work on set pieces, but otherwise he seems like a very very talented manager to me. We got 38 points under McLeish last season, so make of that what you will. Sacking Lambert would be retarded in the extreme, just like the people calling for it.

Baker is very overrated on here. He looks like an honest, hardworking, but poor player to me. Very good in the air, but not much good at anything else. Bennett gives you much more of an attacking threat, and I've seen him put in some good defensive performances too (obviously not today, however). The other alternatives - Lichaj, Stephens - don't give the impression of being much better either, as Ginko says. Players with Bennett's physique peak at an older age. I can see him being very good for us next season, with a summer of strength work and a chance to reflect on this season's mistakes. Re: Chelsea, they aren't as physical or aerial as they used to be, particularly out wide. Would Baker really be the right shout? I'd be more worried about the number of players they have who like to linger between the defensive and midfield lines. We don't have a deep midfield destroyer to deal with players like that. That's slightly ironic given that that's where Lambert plied his trade against the Zidanes of this world. The two options in there are Sylla and Clark, but the former seems to prefer playing higher and the latter doesn't really look like a midfielder (although in many ways he is a poor man's David Luiz). Ultimately, if we lose to Chelsea, it's unlikely to be entirely Bennett's fault. It would be nice if people could lay off him a bit, as he's played a role in our recent revival, often with no midfielders covering in front of him (notice how Benteke had to track back a long way down our left flank in the second half against Norwich).

I posted about this in a thread about Lambert tailoring tactics to the opposition, but I reckon part of Bennett's problem is that he rarely gets much cover in front of him. Today we played Delph, Westwood and Sylla. Delph does sit left a little, but is basically a CM, and Westwood is always bang in the middle. Sylla seems to drift right, particularly in the Sunderland game where he basically played as a RM. So that's why you often see Bennett with acres of space in front of him and men running onto him. Having said that, he does also get very basic defending tasks wrong. A really frustrating player, as he often looks dangerous going forward. I bet he would be more successful in France, Spain or Portugal. Hopefully he will spend some time in the gym this summer beefing up a bit.

You don't have to be a statistician to realise that the stats being posted on this thread are a load of tosh. You just need common sense and a neutral agenda. Also, Bannan doesn't give balance on the left... he plays deep in the center, which is the main reason why we have leaked so many goals this season... no adequate cover for our defense. It's no coincidence that we have looked a lot more solid at the back in the last couple of games, nor that Westwood has got more assists in these two games than our "playmaker" has all season. UTV. No, you missed my point. A lot of people are on here trashing "stats" as a meaningful way of judging players. I'm saying that they can be useful, just that they need to be calculated properly. I don't rate WhoScored - I believe one of their "weaknesses" for Benteke is "holding up the ball", which would suggest they need to go back to the drawing board. As for where Bannan plays, he is nominally a deep lying midfielder, but I'm talking about where he actually stands and touches the ball - usually to the left. If we ever get a chance to watch him play for Villa again, you'll see what I mean.

Well we needed this win because it looks like Wigan are going to hold on to their 3-2 at West Brom. On top of that, it looks like the team going down could well get 40+ points this season. I think we still need 1 more point at the very least - preferably a draw against Chelsea, so we can go into the Wigan game guaranteed to stay up. We were poor today. I thought Westwood, Sylla, Vlaar, and Benteke looked okay. Gaby played out of his skin and was a clear man of the match. Everybody else was poor. Bennett should have been sent off. Benteke could have been sent off. Delph lost the ball over and over again. Weimann (who was class against Sunderland) looked like he'd celebrated too hard last week. Guzan nearly threw it all away at the end. Baker still gives the impression of basically only having one ability (winning headers) and absolutely nothing else. We were very very lucky today. But we've been unlucky earlier in the season, so I guess we deserved a break for once.

As someone who works as a statistician, I would make two points: first, that stats can tell you useful things about football players; second, that most football stats are too simplistic. For example, Con's points-per-game stat would be much more meaningful if it took into account the points-per-game scores of the players Bannan was playing with and against in each of those games. Even then, there are plenty of factors that would be missing. This is why we get real people to manage football teams, and not computers. This is also why I instinctively ignore the footballing opinions of anyone who obsessively plays Football Manager. My view on Bannan is that he adds some balance on the left, which nobody else in the squad offers at the moment. He also shows glimpses of being quite a good passer. The downside is that his corners and free kicks this season have been absolute gash, and he's hardly left his mark on a game with his tackling. I don't know how that WhoScored website have decided he's a good corner taker, but use your eyes to see that it isn't true. Remember the Bradford games? Let's give him a chance, but you're kidding yourself if you think that underneath all the transparently bad performances lurks a statistically incredible player. Sometimes you just have to believe your eyes. Football isn't baseball.

Bannan has been a huge disappointment, but I'd like to see him given a last chance, if only because on his good days he appears to be a very decent player. I think this is more about getting his head in the right place, and a summer break might help that happen. There's no point selling players when they've hit rock bottom unless they're on crazy wages, which I don't think he is? Might as well give him a final shot at it.

Just to further add that it also works both ways. You're not going to like this, but FSW deliberately allowed both our full backs the freedom to roam high up the park so that Chelski could exploit the huge space behind them in the nightmare of Stamford Bridge. FSW?? Fat Spanish Waiter - and it's a great point. If the other manager is also a tinkerer, it's much harder to predict where the weak points will be. Also, while Villa under Lambert are usually pretty inventive going forward, we're defensively predictable - you can guess who the back 5 will be, and it's easy to work out their weaknesses. Someone physical against Bennett, while intelligent movement from the LW and AMs will usually undo Lowton. We've been picking up good results recently against teams who don't have good attacking options. I hope Norwich will fit that bill, as I can see Chelsea turning us over. Re: Bowery, I totally accept he played for the aerial threat and because Gaby was injured, but why station him out on the right? There must be some deeper thinking behind it. Or maybe he just thinks that's the safest place to leave him in open play, out of the way.

I was just listening to the most recent Guardian Football Weekly and there was some discussion of the upcoming Norwich game. The likely outcome of that game and so on is a subject for another thread, but there was an interesting comment from one of the pundits about how PL likes to change his tactics to suit the opposition (and the implication being that Norwich were therefore f*cked, as he knew them inside out). Anyway, I wouldn't have paid much attention to it, were it not for the fact I was faffing about on squawka.com the other day and I noticed that there does seem to be more method in the madness than I thought. For example, against Sunderland, the whole team was incredibly skewed towards the right wing (i.e. pressurising Sunderland's left-back, Danny Rose). Looking at the front six, we had Delph and Westwood playing as centre-mids, and Benteke basically as a CF although hanging slightly left. But the other three (Sylla, Weimann, Gaby) were all focusing on the right wing. On top of that, Lowton was overlapping at every opportunity, while Bennett generally stayed back. I wondered whether this was just the nature of our players - that Lowton is more attacking, that Weimann and Gaby both favour drifting right. But then if you go through a few other games and do the same exercise, you see different things coming through each time. I'll ignore the United and Liverpool games, because we were in less of a position to dictate the play. But looking at the Fulham, Stoke, and QPR games, it's interesting how differently we approached each one, despite using the same 4-3-3 formation that Lambert has settled on recently. Against Fulham, we plugged the right wing with Bowery (is Riise weak in the air?), allowed Zog to roam, and had Benteke and Weimann linking up on the left. Against Stoke, we had the same front six as against Sunderland, but with Bowery instead of Sylla. That seemed to change everything - again, Bowery plugged up the wing, and this time Gaby attacked mainly down the left. Joe Bennett actually got forward marginally more than Matthew Lowton, despite the wonder goal at the end. Against QPR, we fanned out more, with Westwood CM (as ever), Bannan LM, Sylla RM, and the front 3 all playing as conventional strikers. What does this all mean? Well, besides Westwood (CM), Delph (CM and Benteke (CF) who play in fixed, conventional positions, the other players who we rotate in and out of our front 6 change the shape of the attack a lot. - Weimann is an ever-present, but as the link-up man he adapts his game a lot to the players around him - Gaby is usually given one wing to hang on - perhaps the slower full-back?? - Bowery is always used to plug the right wing (any thoughts on when and why PL uses him?) - Sylla is used to press on the right wing - perhaps when PL thinks the left-back is poor under pressure? this seemed a definite tactic all game against Sunderland, with Danny Rose giving away several corners if I remember correctly - Bannan means we'll play a conventional 4-3-3, with a RM-CM-LM and three strikers - N'Zogbia typically turns it into more of a 4-2-3-1, with him, Weimann and Gaby all interchanging as the 3 behind Benteke So if Sylla or Bowery are starting, you can be pretty sure that Lambert has spotted a weakness somewhere. I think that's why you generally don't see either of them starting against top-level opposition - neither started against United, City or Arsenal. (Sylla did start against Liverpool, but that was with Bannan at LM, so we weren't skewing the midfield over to one side.) If you're still awake after all that, how do you think we might approach the Norwich game? Do they have a weaker flank? Does anyone understand the logic behind playing Bowery? Is it just for set pieces? Thoughts please!

http://www.brandfinance.com/images/upload/football_50_2012_press_release.pdf This needs to be shown to prospective managers to drive home how big a club Aston Villa should be. BrandFinance are a reputable company - their brand valuations have been used by the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, so this isn't just some pseudo-scientific BS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shay_Given#Career_statistics the three seasons from 2006-9 don't look great there. Three consecutive seasons of reduced appearances is why Given has a reputation for being injury prone. Now he might turn out to be a great signing, but I reckon his shoulder is dodgy, and there's a 50/50 chance he'll **** it again. If he doesn't, then it's a great gamble, if he does then we have to hope Guzan steps up. On balance, this is a good signing, because there wasn't much else out there to choose from, but there is a big chance this will go wrong.

Foster will be around 10m.. Given around 4m... Kusczkak is available on a free.. Then look ate the wages; Foster 28yrs, 40-50k pw( 3yr deal with trans fee = 30m) Given 35yrs, 50-60k pw(3yr deal with trans fee = 30m) Kusczkak 29yrs, 30-40k pw( 3yr deal with trans fee = 15m) Thats a saving of 15m.. Which we could use to strengthen elsewhere in the team.. And Foster / Kuszczak both recoup some of that in resale value. If Foster does okay and we sell him after a couple of years, we could sell him for roughly what we paid.