Brad Friedel recently sat down with ussoccer.com to discuss, among other things; breaking the record for consecutive Premiership appearances, keeping himself fit as he gets older, yoga, dealing with making mistakes under the glare of the media spotlight and coping with building a long career so far from home.
This 5 minute vid is the first of two parts, I’ll hopefully be able to follow up with the second part when it is released.
Let’s not be naive here. There are rules against tapping up and, with one or two exceptions, they’re generally observed (within reason), but that doesn’t mean that words aren’t said, glances exchanged and knowing nods made before a club puts in an official bid for a player. In fact, it’s highly unusual for a club to feed the paper into the fax machine and dial the number without feeling reasonably confident that it will be well received at
If you’re a Villa fan with a holiday in the Algarve booked around the end of July / beginning of August you just lucked out! The club have announced a couple of pre-season friendlies in Portgual as part of the Guadiana Cup; an annual mini-tournament hosted by Benfica.
The format varies, some years four teams have competed, others just three, it’s not unknown for it to feature only two. This summer it looks like it will be three, with Feyenoord
I’ll just leave this here…
Rejected.
Oh, while I think about it…. Gareth Barry… £12m? I guess this confirms what we already knew… he’s just a poor man’s James Milner!
The first thing I read this morning was Matt Slater’s blog chronicling his experience attending Randy Lerner’s press conference at Villa Park last week. The details of what Randy had to say during the event have filtered out through the usual sources in the days that followed, but I was particularly interested to read Matt’s account for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it was from one of the Tweets that Matt made during the actual press conference that I picked
The curtain fell on a fascinating La Liga season this past weekend with Barcelona crowned champions in triumphant style, but Madrid running them a close second. In fact, Real Madrid have earned more points this season than any team in La Liga history… except one… Barcelona 2009/10.
I know some people are fond of suggesting that the three 6th place finishes mean Aston Villa have not progressed, despite the year-on-year improvement in performance over the last 4 years, and love
Here’s a little statistical curiosity which helps flesh out the picture I’ve been painting recently of relativity. Go back to February 10th and take a look at the table which shows the records of teams against clubs in the top half of the table only. We were second behind Chelsea ahead of our game against Man Utd, which was a draw and left our position intact.
Here’s the same table at the end of the season:-
Team
Pld
W
D
L
F
A
GD
Pts/Gm
Pts
Chelsea
18
10
3
5
40
18
22
1.83
33
Man Utd
18
10
3
5
28
19
9
1.83
33
Tottenham
18
9
4
5
25
24
1
1.72
31
Man City
18
7
5
6
30
24
6
1.44
26
Arsenal
18
7
4
7
33
26
7
1.38
25
Everton
18
6
7
5
30
31
-1
1.38
25
Liverpool
18
6
5
7
19
20
-1
1.27
23
Aston
You thought our season was over, didn’t you? Not quite. We’ve been sending some of the young lions over to Hong Kong each summer for at least the last 8 years to participate in the Hong Kong Soccer Sevens tournament and it’s something we’ve had a fair amount of success in.
Earlier today a team that included Nathan Delfouneso, Marc Albrighton and Ciaran Clark won the trophy for a 5th time, beating Glasgow Rangers 3-2 in the final.
I recently mentioned in flippant fashion that League attendance was down a little at Villa Park this past season, but since we had more cup games – leading to 2 trips to Wembley – and less European matches, I thought it worth looking at overall attendance this year.
Despite falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League, Villa Park still played host to 25 games this season, compared with 27 in 2008/09. When you consider that somewhere in the