It’s hard to know where to begin at the moment, any thought I try to commit to the page risks spiralling into a 5,000 word mess. I’m sure you all have dozens of competing thoughts bouncing around inside your heads too. Whatever ends up here in this post, trust me, I’ve deleted more than remains. Chances are, this post doesn’t say now what I started out trying to say.
To keep things as brief as possible though, there are two subjects
You’ll already be aware that Aston Villa issued an official statement earlier this evening confirming the intention to interview Alex McLeish. Birmingham City have issued their own statement declaring their intention to take legal action in response.
Both statements in full:
Aston Villa Football Club
This is a message to the fans of Aston Villa.
The Club has been reluctant to elaborate publicly on our search for a new manager and, in particular, to confirm or deny our interest in specific candidates.
This is not
I’ve managed to post very little on the subject of our manager search; the absence is probably bordering on conspicuous by now despite my distaste for diving into pure speculation. There’s nothing sinister about it though, the situation seems to be ever-changing, I’d be writing a half dozen posts a day if I attempted to cover every twist and turn.
For instance, I had barely finished writing one post that held Roberto Martinez at its heart before the Lactics manager withdrew
Over the past week or so we’ve had bookies’ favourite after bookies’ favourite billed as the next Aston Villa manager, only to later be dismissed almost as quickly as they emerged. I could count all the posts on the subject from the various Aston Villa blogs and news outlets I subscribe to, but I’m pretty certain it’s easily in triple digits.
Attempting to sort the wheat from the chaff would drive me insane. I’ve taken the nuclear “mark all as
The unofficial Aston Villa winter break finally comes to an end today against an all too familiar opponent. If there is a single team out there that don’t require a preview post right now, it’s Blackburn, so I won’t waste your time or mine, but let’s just take a quick refresher of who’s in and out and a few of the news stories that haven’t made the blog here recently.
Blackburn will be without Canadian David Hoillet. Carlos Cuellar is out
One of the words on the street is that Houllier and Randy Lerner are meeting today to flesh out finances for player acquisitions. Then again, that was also one of the words a couple of weeks back, so who knows?
However, it seems self evident that there’s plenty to discuss and that they’ll be getting together at some point. It also seems self evident that there will be some significant activity in January one way or another.
Paul Faulkner seems
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
It’s brief, it doesn’t reveal much, but the General’s words, which I’ll add below shortly, don’t paint a rosy picture of the scenes behind closed doors at Villa Park.
On the basis of what’s been emerging in the last few days, why Martin O’Neill signed another 12 month contract not two months ago is a mystery to me. I’m sure he’ll give his own version in due course.
Randy Lerner
Having had some time to reflect on Martin leaving, I can say