When James Milner re-joined Villa from Newcastle our side was so conditioned to channel the ball down the left in search of Ashley Young that Milner struggled to get involved and spent far too much time as a spectator. That soon began to change, bit by bit, and it wasn’t long before we were finally achieving the balance we’d missed for so long.
I was reminded of this while watching the 0-0 opening day draw at Craven Cottage. This time is
I wrote a post last year which put forward the notion that James Milner could be our Wesley Sneijder. As it turned out, I missed the mark somewhat, but only because he’s not ours any longer. I still think he would have done very well there for us last season and maybe, just maybe, things might have panned out differently.
C’est la vie.
Now that we’ve received confirmation that a Reo-Coker shaped hole needs filling in the centre of midfield, I found
Marc Albrighton crashing into the first team with such style this season could be the real catalyst for raising this question, after all, Stephen Ireland was considered a like-for-like swap for James Milner and there’s no reason in the world why I’d be asking where Milner would fit in if he was still with us now.
Albrighton made a name for himself last summer with some fine performances with the first team during the Peace Cup in Spain, an opportunity afforded
Note: I was literally about to send this post live when Monday’s bombshell dropped and it ended up being cast to the side while more pressing matters took over. I’m releasing it now should a certain midfielder arrive which would mean redoing all the graphics – no, I didn’t use Milner by the way and no, I don’t have any information about that certain midfielder either.
I’ve been developing some graphics in spare moments over the summer which you’ll probably
I’ve read a lot of criticism of Martin O’Neill’s technical nous, or lack thereof according to some. A lot of it has to do with formation, people want to see something new and sexy. They want to keep up with what the Man Utd’s and Chelsea’s are doing. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of 4-2-3-1, but you’ve got to have the personnel and all systems will ultimately boil down to the personnel employed. Square
It’s been reasonably well reported that Paul Faulkner, and presumably Martin O’Neill, possibly Randy Lerner, will sit down with James Milner after England’s friendlies against Mexico and Japan this month to seek a verbal agreement from James that he will commit to a new contract on his return from the World Cup. The details of that contract will obviously be influenced by what happens in South Africa, but the management team will be looking to sell their vision for
There can’t be too many people close to Martin O’Neill’s innermost thoughts. In fact, there may be a few who wonder whether he is close to his innermost thoughts sometimes, but I couldn’t possibly comment. I’m certainly not among the inner sanctum so it’s idle speculation on my part here, but is it possible that MON’s transfer dealings to date reveal a tactician who is actually ahead of the curve? Wait, hear me out here!
MON’s activity in
Hopefully you’ve spotted that I include the number of good and bad passes in the Statshacks and maybe you find it interesting. Maybe you don’t. There’s a certain logic which suggests that the higher the number of passes, the more expansive the style of play. That’s crude and overly simplistic, but there is enough correlation that I thought I’d look at how we’ve been doing over the last few seasons.
One thing that’s immediately obvious when looking at
You might not realise it to look at lengthy tomes like yesterday’s post exploring the statistics of when goals are scored and conceded, but sometimes I have to cut things out. For the sake of brevity (don’t laugh) I stuck with the premise that in order to open the goal scoring flood gates again the team really just need to slow down and employ a little patience. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit more to it than that.
The question at