JohnCresswell Posted January 12, 2007 Share Posted January 12, 2007 Martin O’Neill has taken advantage of the transfer window being open, but not perhaps in the way many fans would have expected – by managing to get rid of the players deemed as surplus by the boss. In the months leading up to the transfer window, O’Neill has stressed the tiny size of the squad, and expressed desires of improving it in terms of size and quality. The three departures this week could be a sign that O’Neill believes he is set to do that – either that or he is taking a huge risk. Following Peter Whittingham out of the Villa door, who completed his move to Championship promotion hopefuls Cardiff yesterday for anything from £350,000 to nothing depending on which story you read, Gabor Kiraly has returned to parent club Crystal Palace and Eric Djemba-Djemba has left-left and Burnley are the unfortunate ones to have picked him up on a loan deal until the end of the season. Whittingham broke through into the first team in David O’Leary’s first season at the club, but has failed to cement a place in the team. He made a storming performance on his Villa Park debut, where his crossing alone helped Villa beat Leicester City, with three goals in the first half. Despite becoming a regular England Under 21 international he struggled when given first team chances, with some questioning his physical strength. Kirarly answered Villa’s SOS earlier in the season when both first team ‘keepers, Sorensen and Taylor were injured, leaving the club without an established number one. The popular Hungarian certainly kept up his reputation of being eccentric – he made some good saves at the club, but did look worrying when coming to claim crosses now and again. His last action in a Villa shirt was to pick the ball out of the net after his howler against Manchester United in the FA Cup – his performances for Villa merited a better swansong than that. Finally, Villa’s ‘forgotten man’ Eric Djemba-Djemba has found himself at Burnley. Eric was recently quoted saying that he was looking for a club in Spain or France and had been holding talks, so it is something surprising to find out he has gone back up north. Burnley are of course the team where Villa loaned out Gary Cahill to. Djemba-Djemba is somewhat a bit of a strange one for Villa fans. We just don’t know if he;s any good or not – he’s been with us for two years now and couldn’t have played more than 180 minutes of football. This season the Cameroon international has played only one minute of a game – coming on in the last seconds of the Arsenal away game. VillaTalk wishes all three good luck for their future clubs, and asks Martin O’Neill and Randy Lerner to get replacing them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bcarpet Posted January 12, 2007 Share Posted January 12, 2007 and with agathe it makes it four. while none of them were world beaters its worrying about the size of our squad. However i think we must just have faith in MON and Randy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sam100 Posted January 12, 2007 Share Posted January 12, 2007 baros, berger, hendrie all seem to be heading for the exit as well i hope this means we will have a lot of signing to replace them, i just hope we don't get caught out where we can't physically bring the players in because of the high expennse and we end up worse off than when we started we needed players anyway, now we've lost 3 - 4 i hope we have plenty of signings close, because we are very very close to getting dragged in to the relegatin dog fight Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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