Look, no excuses here, we need to take our medicine, we brought this defeat on ourselves by not pressing for a win or sufficiently holding what we had, but I want to quickly highlight an issue that we all know needs fixing.
I’m not advocating that we should do this kind of review during the game, obviously that would be a ridiculous disruption. I’m not advocating that every decision be reviewed either. However, contentious issues that had an effect
If you’ve been on the Aston Villa website since Gérard Houllier was confirmed as Martin O’Neill’s replacement you may have noticed that the marketing team have wasted no time in leaping on this new opportunity. If not, you may have received an email. Take the image below which shows the two frames from a 300×250 ad block appearing all over the site.
A good offer, no doubt, click here if you want to get in on it, but am I
Phil Thompson has explained why he had to turn down Gerard Houllier’s offer to return to coaching in the Premier League and, despite what you might think about him, it’s difficult not to respect him, both for his rationale and his honesty.
Phil Thompson
Had circumstances been different, I would have been delighted to accept the chance to join Gérard Houllier and work with him and Patrice Bergues once again at Aston Villa.
But I had to weigh up the pros and cons
Sporting director, technical director, director of football, general manager. Take your pick, all the same thing. I elected to avoid the director of football tag in the headline as it’s frequently been used in England and without success enough that just the mention of the term leads to assumptions of unavoidable failure.
It’s a system that’s been used in Europe for many years though and in places is regarded as the norm. Quite why it hasn’t taken hold in
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
Among much speculation regarding Champions League bound Tottenham trying to get their hands on no-longer-cup-tied Ashley Young, he’s talked up the team’s desire to bounce back against Everton and also his own determination to re-establish himself in the England set up.
Ashley Young
I’m a positive person. You can’t carry defeats around on your shoulders, because you would be going into the next game having too many negative thoughts. You have to look forward.
Of course, the Newcastle result crushed us. We just
I suppose this might seem like odd timing, but I was planning on compiling and publishing this right before the West Ham game and then Martin O’Neill went and put the kybosh on things. I thought I’d leave the survey open for a little while longer to see whether any of the data trickling in after MON’s departure would take any kind of dip, but I really didn’t see that.
That’s a good thing since I was looking for expectations, not
If you don’t read Richard Whittall’s ‘A More Splendid Life’ regularly you’re doing yourself a disservice. Richard is a Canadian Villa fan – albeit one I suspect is becoming increasingly jaded with what life in the Premier League has become – based in Toronto and today he’s weighed in on an element of the Bradley-for-Villa story that I also find egregious in ‘This Bradley to Villa thing is embarrassing‘.
It’s a good read and Richard might not be using
Rapid Vienna have issued an official apology to Andreas Weimann and Aston Villa after their fans’ deplorable behaviour during Thursday’s Europa League match, showering him with abuse and drinks as he was stretchered off, clearly in a state of distress.
One of the things I love about being back in Europe, even if it’s just the Europa League, is the exposure to a different set of footballing cultures. I think we were all blown away by the experience in Vienna