Relegation Avoidance Thread

[maqroll]

2 hours ago, tinker said:

I think we are going down, sacking Smith is about the worst thing we could have done . This season was always going to difficult but we have just confounded issues. 

Just need a Sherwood type appointment and that's the end of us. Not going to torture myself any more with yet more clowns in charge of us. 

A new manager will bring fresh ideas and the players will want to impress. Add to that dynamic the fact that we have some true quality, we should be fine.

[AVTuco]

2 hours ago, tinker said:

Should have sacked him after 3 games then, he was arguably the worst manager we have ever had. Benteke coming back from injury saved him and us that season. 

The way Smith has gone down after Jack left should tell people that Sherwood was not so bad after all. Sherwood had it worse than Smith. The whole spine of that team left and he got the likes of Richards to the line-up. That summer was lost when snake left, and even before that.

[Mark Albrighton]

9 minutes ago, AVTuco said:

The way Smith has gone down after Jack left should tell people that Sherwood was not so bad after all. Sherwood had it worse than Smith. The whole spine of that team left and he got the likes of Richards to the line-up. That summer was lost when snake left, and even before that.

I think the signs were there before selling Benteke and Delph (really it’s just those two - Vlaar was always injured, Cleverly wasn’t ours). Remember the attempted high line against Southampton? (that Mane hat trick record will never be beaten). The non performance in the cup final? He can’t pin those calamities on not having his better players.

[PaulC]

24 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

I think the signs were there before selling Benteke and Delph (really it’s just those two - Vlaar was always injured, Cleverly wasn’t ours). Remember the attempted high line against Southampton? (that Mane hat trick record will never be beaten). The non performance in the cup final? He can’t pin those calamities on not having his better players.

I think our cup final was Liverpool and the Southampton result didnt matter because we stayed up, job done. Long term he was never the answer but whoever came in would have face the same challenges

[AVTuco]

4 minutes ago, PaulC said:

I think our cup final was Liverpool and the Southampton result didnt matter because we stayed up, job done. Long term he was never the answer but whoever came in would have face the same challenges

Yes, he came in and got the job done. We stayed up. 

[Mark Albrighton]

8 minutes ago, PaulC said:

I think our cup final was Liverpool and the Southampton result didnt matter because we stayed up, job done. Long term he was never the answer but whoever came in would have face the same challenges

Well technically it wasn’t job done at the time of the Southampton game, that was an early kick off and the results later that day meant we stayed up.

And our cup final was the cup final against Arsenal. A semi final is not a cup final.

[HanoiVillan]

8 minutes ago, AVTuco said:

Yes, he came in and got the job done. We stayed up. 

. . . and then got us into an unsalvageable hole with 4 points from 11 games or something the following season.

[PaulC]

 

 

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

. . . and then got us into an unsalvageable hole with 4 points from 11 games or something the following season.

Yes he did but whoever came in would have faced the same challenges. He was the right man to keep us up and the wrong man in which to build a new team. Can we agree on that?  Lambert would have took us down that season 100%

[Mark Albrighton]

If Sherwood has a management/coaching talent, it’s throwing an arm around an underperforming player, getting them back on track. And he did that, no question - most notably with Benteke. The problem is that it doesn’t have much of a lifespan.

 

Anyway while I’m sure @HanoiVillan didn’t intend to start a thread about Tim Sherwood’s tenure, I am going to unreasonably blame him for where this conversation has gone.

Speaking of blame, if Villa do find themselves embroiled in a relegation battle over the duration of the season, it will be interesting to see where people proportionally lay the blame in general. Smith, new guy, board, players. 

[AvfcRigo82]

23 minutes ago, Mark Albrighton said:

if Villa do find themselves embroiled in a relegation battle over the duration of the season, it will be interesting to see where people proportionally lay the blame in general. Smith, new guy, board, players. 

Get the next appointment right and this thread will be locked in no time.

Not sure why it's even existing to be honest.

I don't think we will anywhere near relegation come May given we have now changed manager and about to change backroom staff in the coming weeks.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, PaulC said:

 

 

Yes he did but whoever came in would have faced the same challenges. He was the right man to keep us up and the wrong man in which to build a new team. Can we agree on that?  Lambert would have took us down that season 100%

Yes I would agree with you, though I suppose I would also question whether he was really 'the right man' if the best thing to have done would have been to sack him about 10 games after appointing him.

Anyway, @Mark Albrighton is right, we're drifting off topic. If we're making any sort of comparison to the Sherwood/Garde relegation season, we can be thankful we're 6 points better off than we were at the same stage that season.

[VillaChris]

We just need to get a manager in capable of 6 points v Burnley and Norwich. If we can't beat Norwich that suggests we've appointed the wrong man as by then he'd have had a few weeks to work on methods with squad. And Burnley at home is a bogey fixture for us to win so that would be a good 3 points.

Find another win or two and we'd be low 20s going into 2022. Not amazing but then you only need to win another 3-4 games and you're safe.

I'm still hopefuly we can push on and eventually get close to 50 points this season but obviously need to get a new managerial bounce from whoever comes in for that to be anywhere close to realistic. Probably 40-45 points is where we'll end up unless we sign well in January.

[briny_ear]

On 06/11/2021 at 16:53, tom_avfc said:

We’re eleven games into the season. We have 26 games to get around another 28 points. I’m not quite sure we should be paying too much attention to other teams’ results quite yet. Just concentrate on doing the business ourselves.

Trouble is on current form we are on course to get 23-4 points from these remaining games.

Needs some improvement.

I would like to see us trying to grind out a few draws against superior teams for the next couple of months.

Edited November 8, 2021 by briny_ear

[tom_avfc]

4 hours ago, briny_ear said:

Trouble is on current form we are on course to get 23-4 points from these remaining games.

Needs some improvement.

I would like to see us trying to grind out a few draws against superior teams for the next couple of months.

I mean on current form (last 5 games) we’d get 0 points from the remaining games. If you go back 5 games we had 10 points from 6 games and were on track for 63 points over the season.

It’s amazing how quickly a bit of a shift in form can change the outlook of a season. With the players we have to come back from injury I’d back us to get a few more than 28 points from the remaining 26 games and make this thread look a bit silly come the end of the season.

I’d have backed us to do this under Smith and pretty much any manager to be honest. If the new man can’t achieve this then we’ve got the appointment and the decision to get rid of Smith terribly wrong. 

[roonst83]

33 minutes ago, tom_avfc said:

I mean on current form (last 5 games) we’d get 0 points from the remaining games. If you go back 5 games we had 10 points from 6 games and were on track for 63 points over the season.

It’s amazing how quickly a bit of a shift in form can change the outlook of a season. With the players we have to come back from injury I’d back us to get a few more than 28 points from the remaining 26 games and make this thread look a bit silly come the end of the season.

I’d have backed us to do this under Smith and pretty much any manager to be honest. If the new man can’t achieve this then we’ve got the appointment and the decision to get rid of Smith terribly wrong. 

Is it realistic for us to expect a new manager to go better than that? I would say unlikely. Which is why perhaps a changing of the guard at the end of the season would have made more sense to me. Time will tell but I agree I'm confident Smith would have kept us up.

[maqroll]

Things are never easy at the Villa

[briny_ear]

4 hours ago, tom_avfc said:

I mean on current form (last 5 games) we’d get 0 points from the remaining games. If you go back 5 games we had 10 points from 6 games and were on track for 63 points over the season.

It’s amazing how quickly a bit of a shift in form can change the outlook of a season. With the players we have to come back from injury I’d back us to get a few more than 28 points from the remaining 26 games and make this thread look a bit silly come the end of the season.

I’d have backed us to do this under Smith and pretty much any manager to be honest. If the new man can’t achieve this then we’ve got the appointment and the decision to get rid of Smith terribly wrong. 

I’m not sure it’s helpful to pick different groups of matches and try to extrapolate future form from them. We have played 11 matches this season - over a quarter of our matches - and we have 10 points. You can try to wish this away but it is the position we are in. Maybe Smith could have turned things round: the NSWE Board clearly didn’t agree.

My main point was that the squad needs to buckle down and try to get points, even if that means grinding out draws against better sides. It can’t be much fun for them playing in the current fashion.

[Follyfoot]

4 hours ago, maqroll said:

Things are never easy at the Villa

They are not, I see Aston Villa very much like a extra hard Rubik's cube. If somebody can find a solution it will all click into place and look fantastic

[useless]

Watford at home to Man Utd, Burnley at home to Palace... We really could do with beating Brighton, otherise not beyond the realms of possibility that we could find ourselves in the relegation zone after the weekend, normally wouldn't expect Watford to beat Man U, but I remember the last time we were struggling and it was exactly those kind of results that were going against us.

The trouble is is that there aren't any teams that look significantly worse than anyone else in terms of being capable of picking up points, with the possible exception of Norwich, but even they are only five points adrift with some favorable fixtures to come and the possibility of new manager bounce, so a good chance that there will be at least one team relegated where it might not have been expected, maybe two.

[John]

After the Southampton game, I suggested that we would do well to get 8 points from our remaining games this year. That would have left us on 18 points from 20 games. I think at best we can (allowing for a bit of the usual new boss bounce) get up to 14 points from our next 9 games, which would give us a bit of breathing space. SG is going to need time to get the players to adapt to the style of play he wants to adopt and to install some confidence into them, so we can't expect things to change overnight. 8 points is a minimum and to be fair that wouldn't be good enough in the long run. A point a game would be OK and anything more than 10 points would be a bonus. I hope that before too long our results will see the R word threat diminish and soon see us looking upwards again, rather than anxiously below us at the bottom dweller's results.