How Does Man City’s Squad Stand Up Against The New Home Grown Rule?

After revisiting how the new Premier League “Home Grown Rule” impacts Aston Villa and confirming that we’re comfortably able to comply with the rules, I couldn’t shake my curiosity about Man City. After all, they must be among the worst offenders in terms of the number of foreign players and I keep hearing about how many they’ll have to offload, right?

Well, unless my understanding of the rules is way off, I didn’t find them to be in bad shape

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Three Lions Head Home To Introspection

Actually, the introspection part is just wishful thinking on my part. Far more likely: hand wringing, gnashing of teeth, finger pointing, talk of reform, grass roots etc., but in 4 years time and again, to a lesser degree, in 4 years, we’ll almost certainly repeat the same cycle.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. All fueled by the feckless tabloid media playing to the lowest common denominator and its readership lapping it up.

We English have a disease. It’s a disease of

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Adidas World Cup Star Wars Ad

I featured the Nike ad here mainly because of the obvious Villa connection, but also because it was brilliant.   I’m doing the same with this Adidas ad simply because it’s bonkers and I love it! If the Star Wars theme seems a bit random, it’s probably because they actually have a Star Wars range. I know, still, the commercial is great, especially Snoop’s take on what Luke Skywalker should have said…

Oh, and if you missed it,

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Milner Starts In Centre As England Stumble Past Mexico

I was pleased to see James Milner’s name in the starting XI an hour or so before kick off last night and, since he made up a midfield quartet with Theo Walcott, Michael Carrick and Steven Gerrard, I assumed he’d be playing on the left. Not so. At kick off we found that Capello was playing Gerrard on the left and Milner in the middle. I’m guessing he just wanted to see Milner in a central role

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Congratulations To Blackpool

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

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Nike “Write The Future” World Cup Ad

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!

Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

It’s probably entirely fair that the majority of the sane football world regard Barcelona as the best team on the planet at the moment and Lionel Messi as the world’s best player. Inter Milan were the under dogs for last night’s Champions League semi final and whilst Barcelona aren’t massively superior on a man-for-man basis, it was also fair to describe them as the favourites.

But a funny thing happened; Barcelona lost 3-1.

That’s not what is intriguing me and causing

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Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

I’d like to thank Damian Dugdale of The Villa Blog for confirming what I’ve known for some time; that he has absolutely no integrity whatsoever.

Damian launched a new website today, he’s called it Aston Villa Central and you can find it at astonvillacentral.co.uk. There you’ll find links to lots of other Aston Villa websites. See what he did there? Aston Villa Central, get it? (He has actually been calling his links page Aston Villa Central for some

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Zoltan Frizz – He Sits In Front Of The Back Four And Makes Nice Plays

This is why I love Twitter:-

If you want, you can follow Zolton here, but more importantly, you really should be following Aston Villa Central.

EDIT: Bylis Ballsh has a Wikipedia page and Zoltan is listed in the current squad. Unfortunately he doesn’t have an entry himself yet, but it can only be a matter of time before he’s sitting front of back four, holding midfields and making nice plays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KS_Bylis_Ballsh