KentVillan

Has anyone seen any indication that Bolsonaro has accepted defeat yet?

I doubt it, because I just don’t think the fans would care if Emery sold Coutinho, let alone benched him for a few games. The Ozil situation was very different. He’d been at the club a long time, and a lot of Arsenal fans rated him as the second coming of Zidane. I think Emery comes here with fans having realistic expectations, and a board that has shown a decent amount of patience with its two previous managerial appointments. We won’t go mad if he loses a couple of games.

The thing helping Emery is that none of our players are very popular at the moment I can’t think of a single player (besides maybe Martinez) who would be able to stand up to Emery if he was dropped, and have the support of the fans. Everyone needs to prove they deserve their place.

Yeah I’m sure all the protocols are being followed. Just for reference, though, World Rugby now has a minimum 12 days for most concussions (ie pretty much anything serious enough to merit being taken off). This is because of all the research suggesting that mild (or “minor”) concussions do pose enormous risk if the player takes another knock while it’s still healing. Of course football isn’t rugby, but keeper is the position where the worst head injuries tend to happen (the Exeter keeper was knocked out last week… Petr Cech obviously had a horrendous head injury). We expect keepers to throw themselves at the feet of strikers rushing through on goal, and to catch the ball in goalmouth scrambles, corners, free kicks, contested crosses, etc. So I think beyond the protocols, there’s just the general duty of care. We aren’t privy to exactly what the medical tests have shown, and ultimately it’s the decision of the player, the club, and the medical staff, so not trying to second guess any of that. But *if* there is even a slight risk, I’d be more than happy with Olsen getting another game in net, because surely this next game isn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things? I do also get your point that whatever happened to Emi is not at the extreme end of the scale. He wasn’t knocked out, he wasn’t wobbling around like a boxer in the 12th round. But head injuries are always relatively serious compared with an ankle sprain or whatever, and he took a hell of a blow to the head from Mings.

This guy got the first round wrong, but he seems to have updated his forecasting model. Take with a pinch of salt… Looks worryingly close atm

https://www.aans.org/en/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Concussion This is the issue. Once you’ve got any degree of concussion, it needs to be left to heal. Of course there are sports like boxing where this is probably pushed to the limit, but football isn’t a combat sport, and Newcastle v Villa is not a multimillion dollar world championship fight. Always makes more sense to err on the side of caution, so he can play 100s more games in his career and not suffer from problems in retirement.

Good thread on Elon, I couldn’t post the first Tweet because F word, but start from the top, it’s actually quite well argued.

It sounds more like he didn’t have concussion (ie brain injury), but had head pain from the impact on his skull, and understandably felt uncomfortable continuing. Did the right thing going off, but sounds like he’s passed all the tests. I don’t think there is such thing as “minor concussion”. It’s always an injury that needs to be taken very seriously because it can have long term consequences.

I meant passive in the sense that they are just index tracking. But in the case of Vanguard, for example, I don’t think there’s much evidence of them behaving irresponsibly with their proxy voting role. They held about 8-9% of Twitter stock, and would likely have just gone with the board recommendation to sell at the hugely inflated fee Musk proposed. I doubt individual shareholders would have done anything different. It’s not like Vanguard actively sought out Musk as an investor or meddled in the internal structure of the company. In the end this is just what happens with publicly listed companies. As the Verge article above suggests, Musk may quite quickly find that his investment isn’t as useful as he thought it was. If he plays around with it too much he risks losing even more money, and opening the door to a rival platform that isn’t riddled with racism and disinformation. If he keeps it as it is, then what has he achieved?

Most of these shareholders like Vanguard, BlackRock, etc are simply passive intermediaries for actual investors. It’s not as sinister as it sounds. Mostly it’s someone’s pension fund.

Sounds like he just has a very nasty bruise to his skull! Good news

We’re 6/1 to go down with the bookies, just to put a bit of perspective on it. I think we’ll have quite a few bad results like the 4-0 at Newcastle, but also win enough games at VP against the teams around / below us.

Yeah, concussion is a brain injury, and very hard to assess. He took a big blow from Mings’s knee and didn’t look well on the pitch. I hope we put his long term health ahead of a couple of Premier League games.

We bought Watkins in 2020, though, and he has 27 Premier League goals for Villa. He's having a bad season, but the idea we flushed that money down the drain is just not consistent with what has happened. Plus he's on relatively low wages (and you really need to look at wages when comparing transfers these days, as some players go for low fees, but insanely high wages... e.g. Digne is taking home £8.5m per year, whereas Watkins and Buendia are each taking £3.9m per year). As for Buendia, he rarely gets a consistent run of games, and he was excellent last weekend against Brentford. And he's not a striker, so why are we measuring him on goals anyway? Jury is definitely still out on Buendia, but it's still too early to say whether he was a bad signing IMO. He's only 25, and most likely would still recoup a big fee if sold on. Let's see what Emery can do with him. I don't understand all the negativity about individual players when the club's clearly in a situation at the moment where we aren't getting the best out of our squad.

Don't think Cash was a big problem today. Most of their attacks for the whole 90 mins came down the other flank.

70m isn't that much for two starters these days, and neither of them are on massive wages (75k per week... we spend more on Digne's wages alone). Watkins proved his value the last two seasons (but I agree he needs upgrading now), and the jury's still out on Buendia.

He's just not a winger. His goal record at Villa is pretty solid for a lower / mid table side. 27 in 84 = 1 in 3.1 games, and that was pretty consistent through 2020/21 and 2022/23, so not true to say it was all behind closed doors. I think on that basis he's been a good signing, but we now want to kick on, and it's time to upgrade. I like his work rate, tenacity, aerial strength, etc. but he's not good enough with his feet, not a natural finisher. If we're to progress we need to find someone who combines Watkins and Ings' qualities in a single player.

I wouldn't read too much into that Newcastle result... they're flying at the moment. We'll be fine if we can beat the teams around us, maintain good home form, and sign one or two players in January. I'd be happy with Emery taking us to somewhere like 10th to 13th by end of season. He'll be able to attract some big names in the summer.

Just constantly ruined us down our left side, obviously picked Ashley Young out as a defensive weakness. They were very good but we looked poor. Watkins in particular did absolutely nothing. Time for Emery.

Struggling to watch this

The ref is just absolutely ruining the game, needs to let more slide and play more advantages

This is a tough fixture these days, I don’t think we’ve played too badly, but ref hasn’t really let the game flow. Newcastle probably deserve the lead. But sure we’ll get a couple of decent chances.

Think Buendia tends to overreact to knocks so hopefully okay. Looked sore though!

Looks like he’s a bit hard of hearing and pointing his good ear at him? Or he has a poster of Raquel Welch on the wall

I agree. The nice thing with the rules here is they force people to (mostly) argue the point or at least be fairly civil when making jokes etc… not always perfect, obviously, and doesn’t mean you’ll reach agreement… but generally it’s the form of “free speech” that I think is more in line with what people originally meant by it. And what Twitter maybe could be with a few more rules. Twitter’s version of free speech just results in pile ons, insults, bullying by blue ticks and bots, and then in order to make it readable, people start muting and blocking, and you end up with echo chambers of likeminded people. Tbf it sounds like Musk might already be realising that his vision of a libertarian free for all is going to run into legal and commercial difficulties. Be interested to see how it evolves.