Last year, as Villa headed out to Spain to compete in the Peace Cup, Martin O’Neill left the trio of Agbonlahor, Milner & Gardner behind as they had been given a little extra time before reporting back after taking part in the European Under-21 Championship.
After spotting that Nathan Delfouneso had also been omitted from the travelling party, and doing a little digging, I found he and Nathan Baker were in Ukraine representing England Under 19’s in their European Championships.
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Clearly this is extremely fluid between now and the end of the summer transfer window with players moving in both directions, but following the confirmation of Yaya Toure’s move, here’s the current list of first team midfielders at Man City for next season:-
Michael Johnson
Stephen Ireland
Shaun Wright-Phillips
Adam Johnson
Gareth Barry
Patrick Veira
Nigel De Jong
Yaya Toure
David Silva
I suppose from our perspective, and, I suspect, a lot of teams, that’s a pretty intimidating array of talent. I can’t help wondering whether that’s something James
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In case you didn’t notice, Tottenham sent 22 players out on 32 different loan spells last season. Why? Because Spurs elected not to take part in the Premier Reserve League during the 2009/10 season, which clearly left an awful lot of their players kicking their heels.
It’s an intriguing policy and one I personally feel isn’t too clever in the long run. Equipping your up and coming talent with competitive experience, albeit at a lower level, may well be
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Eric Lichaj impressed most observers during his brief cameo in the senior team during last summer’s Peace Cup tournament in Spain. Although he may have seemed a little green around the gills positionally, he was definitely an exciting prospect going forward, while his pace and aggression allowed him to make up for the odd mistake most of the time. Definitely one for the future.
After a couple of successful loan spells at Lincoln and Leyton Orient under his belt
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You’ve probably already seen the Premiership fixtures for 2010/11 and are hopefully aware that due to a particularly anachronistic and egregious piece of copyright law, I can’t just publish the fixture list here. I’ve no intention of coughing up the £266 plus VAT for the Villa list and absolutely no intention of forking out the £3,931 plus VAT for the full list, so I’ll just pick out some highlights and intertwine the European fixtures which are not protected by
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The club have just confirmed the cat that got out of the bag was indeed genuine and trading company FxPro will be Aston Villa’s commercial shirt sponsor beginning in 2010/11. The three year deal means their logo will replace Acorns, but the club retains key ties to the children’s charity.
FxPro are also principle sponsors of Virgin F1 and World Rally Championship and are clearly looking to expand their brand awareness.
It’s a shame to see Acorns go, but we knew
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Carlos Cuellar’s website has gone live and it looks like he’s going to be doing a spot of blogging. There’s some content there which I’m presuming has been ported over from a column he had at marca.com and I think he’s also syndicating some World Cup analysis to elcorreo.com, but don’t quote me on that. No idea if he’s writing this himself or employing a ghost writer, but it’s pretty cool all the same. The photo albums
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Aston Villa flavoured news has been a little thin on the ground recently, but here’s a few things that have been going on in the last few days that caught my interest:-
World Cup Squad
This is happening right now and whispers started last night that it’s our Stephen Warnock who will be Ashley Cole’s understudy, not Everton’s Leighton Baines. Neither will play unless Cole is injured and, from what I’ve seen of Baines in an England shirt, I know which
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Quick hat tip to EPL Talk for putting me on to this, here’s how much each team in Premiership received (will receive?) in prize and TV money for 2009/10:-
A total of £831m is shared among the 20 teams above plus the 6 teams relegated over the previous 2 seasons receive £12.4m each in “parachute” payments. (As Birmingham City were promoted back to the Premier League, their £12.4m goes to the Football League to share among it’s members).
Each team receives
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