Aston Villa Women

[Farlz]

Ward is a great manager. All things considered, we're a tiny irrelevant club in the women's game with not a huge budget. We won't find anyone better than her.

Everything has been a disaster to start but the fact we lose 1 or 2 key players and completely crumble is probably the biggest concern. There's absolutely no chance of us being best of the rest like that. 

Just get Chelsea out of the way after the international break and then we can reset and hopefully starting picking up some wins. 

[useless]

I hate to break it you but Ward's job will be in no danger whatsoever, regardless of what happens against Chelsea, nothing to do with treating women's football differently, if we were to sack her after all she's done and acheived with us and after our ridiculously difficult start to the season, we would be the laughing stock of women's football, if the equivalent happened in men's football that manager wouldn't be in danger of the sack either.

[Tayls]

It’s troubling how the men’s sky 6 is now also becoming the women’s sky 6 at the same time. Once Leicester have been beaten the top 6 will look awfully familiar. Sickening really. 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Tayls

[useless]

If everyone comes back fit from international break, I think what we should consider doing is getting the starting eleven as close to how it looked to last season as possible, no more trying to squeeze all of Patten, Parker, Corsie, and Turner, into the starting eleven, I'd even consider bringing Lehmann back in, just to get that front three of Hanson, Daly, and Alisha back that was so succesful last season

That's not a comment on the new players, I just think maybe we changed things too quickly, some of it forced, so not blaming anyone for it, plus we had a really disrupted pre-season, which won't have helped the new players settle in,

One thing I'm sure of, we will look a completely different team with Dali and Hanson back, and Pacheco and Mayling have to play too, they were pivotal to how we played last season, especially in attack.

Get Chelsea out of the way, put in a good performance, and hopefully take some confidence from that into the games to follow.

[Ceemo]

22 minutes ago, Tayls said:

It’s troubling how the men’s sky 6 is now also beginning the women’s sky 6 at the same time. Once Leicester have been beaten the top 6 will look awfully familiar. Sickening really. 

Newcastle have also started the process of climbing the divisions, so expect them to be up there in the coming years.

A lot of complaining also of the Champions League format in the past few weeks, so they'll probably change that too to make it identical to the men's version and have the same teams year in and year out. 

 

[est1874]

1 hour ago, useless said:

I hate to break it you but Ward's job will be in no danger whatsoever, regardless of what happens against Chelsea, nothing to do with treating women's football differently, if we were to sack her after all she's done and acheived with us and after our ridiculously difficult start to the season, we would be the laughing stock of women's football, if the equivalent happened in men's football that manager wouldn't be in danger of the sack either.

If the men's team was bottom of the table on 0 points after a quarter of the league season had already passed then yes, of course the manager would be in danger of the sack.

Need I remind you that Gerrard was sacked 12 games into the season when we were above the relegation zone.

Use your brain.

[Villanbee]

This difficult start excuse is nonsense. There are only 10 other teams in the league. You will regularly meet the top 4.

Last season we finished fifth. So far we've played four games. Two against teams that finished above us (one home, one away) and two against teams who finished below us (one home and one away). Next two games are against the team that finished top and then the team who were promoted. In the more difficult fixture, we are at home.

Seems pretty fair to me.

Anyway, we shouldn't be worrying about playing the top teams. There is supposed to be a project within both the women's and men's teams which sees year on year progression and us offering a threat to the established top teams. We shouldn't be fearful of playing teams who finished above us or accepting that consistently losing against them is acceptable. We have broken that mentality with the men's team. The same expectation should be applied to the Villa women's team as the mens. Farlz may think we're a 'tiny irrelevant club in the women's game', but we have a team stacked with talent, with international standard players in all positions and two Ballon d'Or nominees.

Having no points from four fixtures was never in the script and I'm sure that the powers that be won't be saying that it's ok because we had to play Man U and Arsenal in those fixtures.

Useless, you seem convinced Carla is untouchable. Gemma Davies was highly rated, but look what happened there. With the men's team, Dean Smith had much more credit in the bank than Carla has with the women's team but, again, the plug was pulled relatively quickly after we were seen to be lacking progression on the positive season that had gone before it.

The key is progression. At the moment, we look a shadow of last year's team, despite an active transfer window which should have meant more ability to cope with losing the likes of Dali and Hanson.

Today was an abject performance. Liverpool was poor and I've made my feelings on the second half display last week clear. We look like a bunch of strangers out there. No service to Daly, no ball retention, poor decision making and a shambles at the back conceding sloppy and late goals. Surely that's coaching?

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Villanbee
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[Xela]

We've had a shit start, no question. The desire to cram 4 centre backs into the team is a strange one, and it has backfired, that is on the manager. 

My concern is that if we have a poor year, our better players like Dali and Daly will look to move on.

[Leeroy]

I think Carla Ward is under serious pressure. Relegation candidates currently and we shouldn’t be. Should have won today, spurs aren’t all that.

[Farlz]

We won't be anywhere near relegation. 

[est1874]

8 minutes ago, Farlz said:

We won't be anywhere near relegation. 

There are only 15 league games left and we've to play these same 4 teams again, and Chelsea twice it's at least a possibility.

[useless]

The women have played four games, that's in not comparable to the mens having played a quarter of a season which is nine and a half games, so I'm not the one who needs to use my brain. If you don't believe me that Ward's job isn't under threat wait and see what happens or rather what doesn't happen.

When you look at it all that's happened is that we've lost four games, two of those defeats to teams we were always likely to lose to, the other two results are disappointing and frustrating, but I hate to break it to people we were always going to lose games like this across the season as well, it's deluded to think otherwise, last season we had our best ever season and lost to Everton and West Ham in consecutive games early on.

And the difficult start isn't nonsense at all, and it's frankly ridiculous to claim otherwise, three of our first five games are against the top four, and one of the others away to the team that was the best home side in the league last season besides the top four, it was an absolutely horrendous set of fixtures, if you wanted to plan for us to have a difficult start as possible, those are pretty much the fixtures that would he hand picked.

Also it's a lot more nuanced than we finished above such and such team so should be beating them, the order of the fixtures plays a part too, for example if the mens team play a bunch of teams near the bottom of the table, get some good results and then play Brighton then they're going to have a better chance in that Brighton game than if they played them after playing a bunch of the divisions better teams and not doing so well, the context of the fixtures plays a part too, also can't ignore things like injuries and suspensions, the signings that other clubs will have made, and maganerial changes, also the form of other teams, Spurs have had a brilliant start to the season so their confidence was always going to be high, for us the oppposite, also Spurs are no minnows like some trying to make out, they broke the WSL transfer record in January, and are expecting to challenge for top six.

Obviously can be disppointed about the start to the season, I was expecting betwen two and six points from the first five games, the Liverpool and Spurs defeats especially disappointing, but some of these comments seriously lack perspective, Ward's job isn't under threat, and won't be, we won't be anywhere near a relegation battle, we're more likely to finish fifth again than be in any serious danger of going down.

What is also being ignored by some, or the importance of it not fully understood, is the players we've had missing, if those had have been out later in the season it might not have been as bad, as the new players would be more settled by then, but because it's happened now it's mean having to rush in new players at a time where they're still settling in, Dali and Hanson missing will always be a big miss anytime, they were two of the best players in the league last season.

There was also a lot of disruption to our pre-season, in Spain half the team had to go into isloation because of illnesses, we had our final two pre-season games called off, some of the players barely had any pre-season at all because international duty, some of them didn't play in any friendlies.

I'm actually still quite positive and think we will challenge for top six, which would always have been a good season, you only have to look at how teams that finish fifth typically struggle the following season to see that, finish best of the rest is one thing, but maintaining that is the hard part, as Ward as said on many occasions herself.

 

[est1874]

20 minutes ago, useless said:

The women have played four games, that's in not comparable to the mens having played a quarter of a season which is nine and a half games, so I'm not the one who needs to use my brain. If you don't believe me that Ward's job isn't under threat wait and see what happens or rather what doesn't happen.

When you look at it all that's happened is that we've lost four games, two of those defeats to teams we were always likely to lose to, the other two results are disappointing and frustrating, but I hate to break it to people we were always going to lose games like this across the season as well, it's deluded to think otherwise, last season we had our best ever season and lost to Everton and West Ham in consecutive games early on.

And the difficult start isn't nonsense at all, and it's frankly ridiculous to claim otherwise, three of our first five games are against the top four, and one of the others away to the team that was the best home side in the league last season besides the top four, it was an absolutely horrendous set of fixtures, if you wanted to plan for us to have a difficult start as possible, those are pretty much the fixtures that would he hand picked.

Also it's a lot more nuanced than we finished above such and such team so should be beating them, the order of the fixtures plays a part too, for example if the mens team play a bunch of teams near the bottom of the table, get some good results and then play Brighton then they're going to have a better chance in that Brighton game than if they played them after playing a bunch of the divisions better teams and not doing so well, the context of the fixtures plays a part too, also can't ignore things like injuries and suspensions, the signings that other clubs will have made, and maganerial changes, also the form of other teams, Spurs have had a brilliant start to the season so their confidence was always going to be high, for us the oppposite, also Spurs are no minnows like some trying to make out, they broke the WSL transfer record in January, and are expecting to challenge for top six.

Obviously can be disppointed about the start to the season, I was expecting betwen two and six points from the first five games, the Liverpool and Spurs defeats especially disappointing, but some of these comments seriously lack perspective, Ward's job isn't under threat, and won't be, we won't be anywhere near a relegation battle, we're more likely to finish fifth again than be in any serious danger of going down.

What is also being ignored by some, or the importance of it not fully understood, is the players we've had missing, if those had have been out later in the season it might not have been as bad, as the new players would be more settled by then, but because it's happened now it's mean having to rush in new players at a time where they're still settling in, Dali and Hanson missing will always be a big miss anytime, they were two of the best players in the league last season.

There was also a lot of disruption to our pre-season, in Spain half the team had to go into isloation because of illnesses, we had our final two pre-season games called off, some of the players barely had any pre-season at all because international duty, some of them didn't play in any friendlies.

I'm actually still quite positive and think we will challenge for top six, which would always have been a good season, you only have to look at how teams that finish fifth typically struggle the following season to see that, finish best of the rest is one thing, but maintaining that is the hard part, as Ward as said on many occasions herself.

 

Five games is what we were talking about - after the Chelsea game - as you well know. 5 / 19 games = 26.3% so literally greater than a quarter of the season.

Yes we have key players missing. So does the men's team - we literally are without our best defender and our best goalscoring midfielder, not to mention a rampaging left-back. Emery however is a great manager so he still gets the best out of the rest of the squad and we're doing well.

Ward is not a top manager. We need better.

[useless]

 

[Villanbee]

Useless, I take on board all the comments you've made, but I can't help but think they read like an essay of excuses.

You talk of the nuances of it not being so simple as we finished above so and so and should beat them. I get that. But then your argument seems to be that we've played teams who finished above us last season etc. so it's expected that they beat us.

We don't have a monopoly on bad luck.It's not like other teams aren't without players. That WSL transfer fee record signing didn't play today for Spurs because of injury.

At the moment, the team looks a mess.

[Xela]

Football is a results business. Bad luck/excuses won't wash. 

I hope Carla can turn it around, but she is under pressure now. 

[useless]

Ward is under pressure, but only in the sense that she's always under pressure to get results and more so now just to end the run we're on, but she's not in any immediate danger of losing her job, not even close, that might become a threat if we were to lose the next four or five, but that is highly unlikely to happen, like really unlikely, in fact I shall make a prediction Carla Ward will win manager of the month for November, or if not win it will be one of the nominations, which I'm basing on our fixtures to come in that month.

She's one of the most highly rated managers in women's football, look what she's achieved with Sheffield United, small heath, and us, I can guarantee if any of the top four or England were to change managers she would be linked with those jobs.

I think what also needs to be remembered that's it's another area where you can't use men's football as a guide, women's football at this high level is still very young, there aren't as many top managers in the game, it's not like mens football where there's a hugh pool to pick from, which is one of the reasons why Ward would be a contender for a top four job on top of how well she's done for us and others.

[useless]

Our U21s have been drawn against Solihull Moors Foundation in the next round of the Birmingham Challenge Cup, I'm presuming they will actually play their first team for a game against us rather than a foundation team, otherwise could be a ridiculous scoreline, we beat Burton's first team by six goals and they play at an higher level than Solihull as far as I can work out, and that was with us missing some players.

Wolves, West Brom, and small heath have got teams in the competition, only small heath's U21s would give ours a game, if we were to come up against the other two would probably have to play their first team, and even then we would probably have a chance of winning as our U21s have beat third tier teams.

It's why our U16 girls have to play against boys teams as lack of quality girls opposition locally at that level, to be fair as far as I'm aware it's like that for all the girls top academies, they have to play boys teams as not enough girls teams good enough to give them a worthwhile game.

[thejoker]

2 hours ago, useless said:

 

Doesn’t really inspire much confidence with some of her answers. The start has been dreadful, but I’d say she’s still got plenty credit in the bank to get the chance to turn things around. 

[HanoiVillan]

3 hours ago, est1874 said:

Five games is what we were talking about - after the Chelsea game - as you well know. 5 / 19 games = 26.3% so literally greater than a quarter of the season.

Yes we have key players missing. So does the men's team - we literally are without our best defender and our best goalscoring midfielder, not to mention a rampaging left-back. Emery however is a great manager so he still gets the best out of the rest of the squad and we're doing well.

Ward is not a top manager. We need better.

I'm confused where you're getting this 19 number from. There are 11 other sides, we play them all twice, that's a 22 game season, no?

Anyway I agree with your broader point that she's obviously under pressure and her job will start to come into question in the near future unless we get a big uptick in results.