I’ve been mucking around with the Actim Top 100 Index for a good few years now: I used to publish regular updates in an old forum before Aston Villa Central existed. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb type of measure.
Someone once asked me whether the Villa players generally do so well because they play so many games. The short answer is yes.
However, they still have to do the business on the pitch
Luke Young’s recent interview caused a predictable little debate here and there about how Carlos Cuellar isn’t a right back, etc. etc. Yes, he’s a better defender, but “he doesn’t offer the same as Luke going forward”. Or words to that effect. Seems like a good time to put their stats alongside each other.
I’ve trawled through the 38 Premiership games from the 2009/10 season and pulled the metrics for the games each player played at right back
It’s been reasonably well reported that Paul Faulkner, and presumably Martin O’Neill, possibly Randy Lerner, will sit down with James Milner after England’s friendlies against Mexico and Japan this month to seek a verbal agreement from James that he will commit to a new contract on his return from the World Cup. The details of that contract will obviously be influenced by what happens in South Africa, but the management team will be looking to sell their vision for
Somehow along the way Martin O’Neill has picked up the reputation of being something of a swordsman when it comes to man management. My suspicion is that this is the result of back handed compliments as much as anything. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read some McExpert or other opining about his lack of tactical nous, only to balance their critique by conceding that he’s a “good man manager” in some sort of
Blackpool have just beaten Cardiff 3-2 in a thrilling play-off final at Wembley to win promotion to next season’s Premier League, joining automatically promoted Newcastle and West Brom.
Besides the Premiership link, the game also featured ex-Villan Peter Whittingham, who has been one of Cardiff’s key players over the last couple of seasons, and also our very own Barry Bannan got a run out for Blackpool in the last couple of minutes.
This was the match recently christened “the £90m game” since
I haven’t had chance to get an End of Season Review post out for a little while, so I’m throwing this one in as a “quickie”. If you’re expecting to find Aston Villa at the bottom of this squad rotation table, you won’t be disappointed. If you feel so inclined, you could take a quick glance at the tables for the previous two seasons first. You’ll find that 2009/10, on this basis, was an improvement. Not
Brad Friedel recently sat down with ussoccer.com to discuss, among other things; breaking the record for consecutive Premiership appearances, keeping himself fit as he gets older, yoga, dealing with making mistakes under the glare of the media spotlight and coping with building a long career so far from home.
This 5 minute vid is the first of two parts, I’ll hopefully be able to follow up with the second part when it is released.
Let’s not be naive here. There are rules against tapping up and, with one or two exceptions, they’re generally observed (within reason), but that doesn’t mean that words aren’t said, glances exchanged and knowing nods made before a club puts in an official bid for a player. In fact, it’s highly unusual for a club to feed the paper into the fax machine and dial the number without feeling reasonably confident that it will be well received at
You may have seen the teaser ads floating around recently, especially the one with Wayne Rooney, well here’s the full 3 minute version and it’s brilliant. I can’t wait for this World Cup!!
I bet the execs at Nike were thrilled when Dunga left Ronaldinho out of Brazil’s squad though!