More Champions League Throwbacks

The fourth round and final round of qualification for the Group Stage of the Champions League was completed tonight, with the 10 losers being dumped down into the Europa League.

Sheriff, København, Celtic, Timişoara, Sporting, Panathinaikos, Levski Sofia, Anderlecht, Salzburg and Ventspils with be entered into the draw for the Europa League Group Stage along with the 38 winners from Play Off Round, which will hopefully include Villa.

It’s looking likely that Levski Sofia will also be a Pot 3 team with

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Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3

Actually, this isn’t the third part of a monster blog post – it’s a rather tabloid-like attempt at a headline based on an old Ian Dury song. Sorry, won’t happen again. And if hearing that song again doesn’t cheer you up, maybe news that Aston Villa are top of the table might…

Ooops, I’ve done it again – not the Premiership table, natch – I’m talking about the “Stewardship Table” compiled by business think tank Tomorrow’s Company. Here’s

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Squad Rotation

A few days ago a story appeared on the OS that featured a quote from Martin O’Neill that he’s rightly taken some stick over:-

At the end of last week, I went to a meeting for managers and they put up some interesting statistics. They showed that 17 of our lads had played in the Barclays Premier League last season. Other teams had used 23, 27 and others over 30. I was a wee bit surprised. I knew how

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Friedel: MON Is Our Fergie

I just saw a comment on a forum somewhere that made me chuckle. A poster was countering this ‘lost the dressing room’ nonsense by pointing out that Brad Friedel has recently compared Martin O’Neill to Sir Alex Ferguson in terms of his authority, command and respect at Aston Villa. He quite rightly points to this aspect being a key element in Man Utd’s growth to the club they are today.

Another poster totally missed the point and argued:-

Fergie has

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Europa League Squad

Aston Villa have just announced a 22-man squad to travel to Austria for Thursday’s Europa League tie against Rapid Vienna. Interesting to note that there’s no place for Marlon Harewood, even though I believe we could have taken up to 25 players.

Goalkeepers
Brad Friedel, Brad Guzan, Andy Marshall

Defenders
Curtis Davies, Carlos Cuellar, Nicky Shorey, Habib Beye, Eric Lichaj, Ciaran Clark, Shane Lowry

Midfielders
Steve Sidwell, Ashley Young, James Milner, Marc Albrighton, Fabian Delph, Stiliyan Petrov, Nigel Reo-Coker, Craig Gardner

Forwards
John Carew, Gabby Agbonlahor, Nathan

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3 Years Of Martin O’Neill – Part Two

In part one we looked at a graphical representation of four Aston Villa managers accumulating points in the Premiership over the course of their first 114 games at Aston Villa – roughly a 3 year period. John Gregory was in first place with 174 points, Martin O’Neill and Brian Little were tied on 172 points and David O’Leary was predictably bringing up the rear with 145 points.

We’re now going to look at the data behind the chart to compare

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3 Years Of Martin O’Neill – Part One

Some time ago I decided to take a statistical look at Martin O’Neill’s first 100 league games for no other reason than it was an interesting milestone. The first table in that post showed MON’s first 100 games up against the record of the other manager’s first 100 games – well, almost in Ron Atkinson’s case. The second table puts that same 100 game record against other manager’s career league records at Villa. (Premiership only).

Interestingly, there’s a little

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Time Heals All Wounds

I’m starting to think that losing the opening game against Wigan will turn out to be a good thing, if given time. Whether the Peace Cup could be dismissed as just pre-season or not, we were on a high from picking up a trophy and arguably “discovering” some hidden gems among our reserves.

Wigan was definitely a wake up call. The players lost their day off and were dragged in for training yesterday. No one at the club

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John Carew’s Absense From Squad

It was only April that I took the opportunity to jump on some of John Carew’s words about how he’s finding his time at Aston Villa. Why? To recap briefly; October 23rd ’08, Villa beat Ajax 2-1 in the UEFA Cup at Villa Park and Carew was surprisingly left out of the squad. Martin O’Neill was questioned about this during a press conference the following day and he said that Carew had been complaining of tiredness, was

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