For all the questions regarding the strength in depth of the current Aston Villa squad, there hasn’t been a great deal of discussion, so far as I’ve seen, about the captaincy. In truth, the role of the captain is often overblown, and it has to be said that the other highly paid professional athletes on the pitch shouldn’t need any motivation or encouragement from a colleague, but a great leader can still be worth his weight in gold.
Or points. I
The somewhat light pre-season fixture list gets underway for us tomorrow with a familiar trip to the Bescot. It’s a game that Shay Given expects to play in and should provide the first clues about Alex McLeish’s thinking in terms of tactics and style of play.
It’s highly unlikely that we’ll have recruited a new left winger by then, so perhaps we’ll see how innovative McLeish is too. Will he ask someone like Gabby or Bannan to fill in on the
There is apparently a quote from Alex McLeish doing the rounds this evening which has caused a few knickers to get well and truly twisted. It doesn’t take much admittedly, if it’s not the colour of socks, it’s something else equally earth-shattering. The new gaffer has said something to the effect that he only expects to make one more signing before the season starts.
ZOMG!?!? Where’s the ambition?!?
Without seeing the actual words, or arguing the semantics attached to “start of the
The new Nike supplied kit for the 2011/12 is officially being unveiled at Star City tonight, a neat connection to new main sponsor Genting. Of course, the away kit had already been launched and leaked images surfaced on the interwebz last month. The home kit had leaked even earlier, way back at the beginning of May. Seems like a lifetime ago now.
So, more of a confirmation than an unveiling then.
New signing Shay Given is joining Darren Bent, Gabby Agbonlahor, Marc
So, Liverpool upped their offer to £20m, Stewart Downing handed in a formal transfer request and there’s not much more that needs saying. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Stewie. Textbook no-brainer.
That’s £8m more than we paid Middlesbrough two years ago, but represents a £14m profit in terms of “disposal of player’s registration”. Aside from the fact that we went from three wingers to two recently, and now to just the one, it still represents some
I’ve covered the Premier League 25-man rules several times since it first cropped up so I won’t dwell on the details in this post. If you recall, last summer we named 22 players within our maximum of 25 players 21 years old or over on January 1st 2010 without any problems with the quota of “home grown” players. Including the academy players, we had no less than 36 additional players under the age of 21 also listed.
That stacked up favourably
It’s been a while since anything surfaced here at Aston Villa Central, I know. The last post confirmed Ashley Young’s somewhat low key move to Man Utd and since then very little of substance has actually happened. Well, the Stewart Downing “situation” has threatened to develop into a “saga”, but aside from a couple of actual bids from Liverpool being reported, nothing has changed yet; Downing is still an Aston Villa player. For now.
McLeish has stated categorically that he’s “not
After a generally well received first press conference, it looks like life at Villa Park is getting off to a predictably busy start for Alex McLeish. During his time in front of the cameras on Monday, he mentioned being inundated with calls from agents offering their players, but it’s the futures of Carlos Cuellar and Michael Bradley that are capturing the headlines first.
Carlos Cuellar
McLeish was quizzed about Cuellar’s future specifically because it’s become fairly open knowledge that Rangers are interested
It’s hard to know where to begin at the moment, any thought I try to commit to the page risks spiralling into a 5,000 word mess. I’m sure you all have dozens of competing thoughts bouncing around inside your heads too. Whatever ends up here in this post, trust me, I’ve deleted more than remains. Chances are, this post doesn’t say now what I started out trying to say.
To keep things as brief as possible though, there are two subjects