The 9th of February is a FIFA scheduled interlull and we have quite a number of players called up to their senior national teams:
Firstly, Darrent Bent, Gabby Agbonlahor, Ashley Young, Stewart Downing and Kyle Walker were called up to the England squad travelling to Copenhagen to play Denmark.
Kyle Walker had previously been named in the Under-21 squad heading to Italy which includes Fabian Delph, Marc Albrighton and Nathan Delfouneso.
Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales play the first fixtures
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I know I’m in the minority here, but I’ve never really drunk the Holloway Kool-Aid. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with much that he says, most of it is basic common sense, it’s more that I’ve met a thousand Ian Holloways and they’re all the same; entertaining enough, but only in small doses.
I can’t fault his approach on the pitch, Blackpool are truly a breath of a fresh air, but we have to be careful not to be patronising.
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Part two was an exploration of Gerard Houllier’s first 14 Premier League games in comparison with Dr Jo’s first 14 games in charge of Aston Villa back in 1990. Mainly because their record over the 14 games was so similar, despite Houllier’s program being considerably more challenging, but also because our position after 19 games is exactly the same today as it was 20 years ago.
Ian made the point in the comments that the table around us is not
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As starts go, Gerard Houllier has made a particularly bad one with Aston Villa; winning just 13 points from his first 14 league games, fuelling the fire with a number of clumsy PR gaffes, a growing army of fans calling for his head.
In part one, we looked at Villa’s history of dealing with the threat of relegation and here in part two we’ll make a direct comparison between Houllier and Jozef Venglos who oversaw a terrible season at Villa Park,
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We finished 6th in the Premier League last season for the 3rd season running; apparently evidence of stagnation for a significant proportion of fans. The fact is, and forgive me for repeating this once again, Aston Villa hadn’t achieved three top six finishes on the bounce in the top flight since 1933.
Hopefully it won’t be another 77 years until we can taste such putrid stagnation, but right now you’d be forgiven for thinking it feels that way. Those three
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Since last year, Premier League clubs have been required to publish the payments they’ve made to agents during the preceding 12 months at the end of November and the OS revealed that players’ representatives have received £2.28m from Aston Villa between October ’09 and September ’10, up from the £1.71m last year.
Given the lack of transfer activity at Villa Park in the last year, that might cause a head or two to be scratched. I suspect it reflects how some
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I know many people were more than a little concerned about Gérard Houllier’s age when he was appointed and that may well have caused feelings that his appointment wasn’t a long term solution. Initial reports of a two year contract seemed to compound that feeling, despite his predecessor operating on a 12 month rolling contract that proved to be entirely worthless in the final analysis anyway.
Maybe the fact that his contract, once it was eventually signed, was actually three
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The Premier League have announced a raft of fixture changes over Christmas and New Year, several involving Villa:-
Liverpool, Anfield – moved from Sat 4th December to Mon 6th December, 8pm kick off.
Tottenham, Villa Park – December 26th, kick off now at 5.30pm.
Chelsea, Stamford Bridge – moved from Sat 1st January to Sun 2nd January, 1.30pm kick off.
All 20 Premiership clubs were required to submit their squads for use in the Premier League today and they were all pretty much as expected, although Luke Moore was left out of the West Brom squad, so we won’t be seeing him playing Premiership football this side of January.
Clubs were required to list up to 25 players over the age of 21 on January 1st and within that list, no more than 17 could be players not classed as “Home
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