Almost all of the final Europa League 3rd qualifying round games are coming to a close and by the end of the night we’ll know the 35 teams joining us in tomorrow’s draw for the play-off round ahead of the group stage.
A few ties have been decided already, among them Rapid Vienna, who beat PFC Beroe Stara Zagora from Bulgaria 4-1 on aggregate. So, is it possible that we could get a rematch against our opponents from the same
I spotted this wonderful post by OutByEaster? on Villa Talk late last night and re-tweeted a link to it, but as most of you would have missed that and it’s so good, I thought it worth dropping a quick post here to draw your attention to it.
It’s a long article, but it’s most definitely worth your time, but I’d suggest one or two minor caveats. The following paragraph is a little misleading, but it’s extremely timely since it follows
Ian posted an interesting comparison between the 2008/09 Aston Villa and Tottenham employee costs at Aston Villa News & Views recently and noticed an intriguing difference in the number of people employed by the clubs given their apparent similarities.
Tottenham’s wage bill has been a popular curiosity for Villa fans since they were evidently able to get through 2008/09 spending £10m less than we did on employees.
I share Ian’s confusion about how Tottenham can apparently run their operation with considerably less
The 22 man squad arrived in Portugal ahead of the weekend’s Guandiana Cup friendlies against Feyenoord and Benfica on their own private jet yesterday. That includes Luke Young, James Milner and James Collins, who was cleared after a scan on his calf Wednesday morning.
Luke Young’s agent has confirmed that he is discussing personal terms with Liverpool. Meanwhile, Liverpool manager Roy Hodgson insisted on showing his Macedonian hosts the courtesy of discussing tonight’s Europa League match against Rabotnicki, refusing
Spain coasted into the final of the European Under 19 Championship in France with a commanding performance against an England side who are clearly not in the same league technically.
Nathan Baker limped off midway through the first half with what looked like a pulled hamstring, Nathan Delfouneso may have wished he could have joined him after seeing very little of the ball during the first 45 minutes.
Spain held the majority of possession during the first a half and converted that
Last September, I wrote an overly lengthy post which stumbled its way through the then recently ratified rules introducing quotas on numbers of “home grown” players and squad size limits on Premiership teams from 2010/11. The conclusion I eventually came to was that it would not adversely affect Aston Villa in any way. It just took a while to get there.
As we head ever closer toward the start of the 2010/11 season, with much speculation about the likes
I didn’t get to see any of the Under 19’s today, but as I was leaving the house earlier I did note that England were losing 1-0 to the extremely impressive French and Holland were being held 0-0 by Austria. Even if England could get back on terms it wouldn’t be enough, they needed Austria to win.
Well, that’s exactly what happened.
With three minutes left in Mondeville, Ricky van Rhijn brought Georg Teigl down in the box and
This is really pretty cool. Imagine an online version of a book or magazine, but an interactive version where the pictures can actually be video, additional content such as data table can be expanded and links can be included to external content. I recommend using the button in the bottom right to go full screen and have fun exploring. I did find some of the video content a little buggy, but that may have just been me.
As armchair managers, our job is no more complicated than dreaming up wish lists of players, deciding who gets to start in the team sheets and what formation they will play and assigning arbitrary valuations of players for transfer market purposes. Yes, arbitrary values, and buying players is no more complicated that writing that value on a bit of paper and feeding it into the fax machine.
A player is worth what the buying club are willing to pay and