Smirking_Saint

Because if your take on virology is incorrect, and we open up too early... thus creating a situation where the virus again takes hold then the dates of respite for the sectors you have mentioned being impacted will have to be put back Im not a fan of this situation, I haven't been for the full 18 months, its been awful.... Ive lost people to it, because of it and arguably it took a significant toll on my mental health due to a multitude of other issues (Im fully aware im not alone in that) but we are where we are now and I do think we are better seeing it through I cannot condone the actions of the government, and cannot help but feel if it wasn't for their negligence on a great many issues then we could have been out of this sooner and with less disruption June 21st in a realistic target, set with the intention of meeting herd immunity... should we fail after this then I'm not sure what we have left in our armoury. Let us remember its not just a case of 'opening up and abandon the vulnerable', the speed at which it takes hold poses a viable risk to the NHS, which is a much greater risk to the majority than the virus poses in isolation

What exactly is your point ? Sancho is both skilful and pacey, as is Rashford and Sterling Lingard doesn't have the pace of those three.... all four of who I just mentioned are black... Your comment is very odd

We don't know where we will be next summer, at some point the club will change hands, for better or for worse... I imagine we will see something over the next 6-9 months With that in mind I think its worth gambling on keeping both JWP and Ings, as like I said, without both we will almost certainly be relegated and with a 70m debt and an owner with no financial muscle then we will be in all kinds of trouble We won't replace Ings with 20m and the cost of relegation far outweighs that, which is why I'd comfortably let him see his contract out

This really Incoming funds or not, I find it very strange that some fans are considering taking the money for Ings and JWP... who, in reality, are the only reason we probably survived over the last two seasons I cannot see us replacing them adequately either TBH Which is why Im firmly in the 'resist all offers for both' camp

I think its patently obvious that the vote ID is being pushed to suppress votes to be fair

I like Lingard, he has had a great season, but out of interest who does he replace ? He doesn't replace Mount/Grealish/Foden for me and although he is in form Rashford/Sterling/Sancho offer pace which is something different Lingard would have been one of the last of the options for me, as he is unnecessary

More than likely Seems an absolute steal at that price

My issue is that Maguire isn't even running yet, so why are we gambling on him ? Its just odd, and despite our lack of options at CB I'm still struggling to get my head around it The uplift to 26 was to ensure that we had cover IF we had issues with fitness at the tournament due to a busy season, which is a legitimate risk, but instead he decided to call up an extra 2 that were injured or lacking fitness I can just about understand Henderson, he is a leader, and without him OR Maguire we will effectively have lost our C and VC BUT it is, imo, madness to call up both I can only assume Mings is called upon as he is a left footed CB, but lets be real, he isn't even the best CB at Villa, he is a calamity waiting to happen and I would comfortably bet money he'll cost us at least a goal this tournament Rose tinted glasses off - JWP is likely all round a better player than Phillips, but he isn't AS good as Phillips as a pure DM, which is probably why KP got the overall nod. It feels as if Rice will be our first No.6 with Henderson as the No.8... JWP doesn't break into that Then accommodate Mount/Bellingham (Who I think is worth being in the squad, he is a real talent) and Foden/Grealish Ultimately I think JWP was the Henderson alternative and I think since JH has been given the fitness nod then that is the death of JWPs chances Ben White has been called to cover maguire, which again goes back to the question I asked before..... why take him in the first place ?

Yes Les Reed was in sole charge of all transfer activity, youth player decisions and team bus seating arrangements

I'd genuinely be over both for that price

You can say that about a lot of teams Fact is they have Grealish, and they are willing to spend money I'd don't like Villa much but you cannot deny they have serious intentions of breaking that top 6

Whilst I agree... the fact that the greater footballing community isn't boycotting Qatar, or actually tackling racial incidents is pretty depressing that doesn't really correlate with booing players taking the knee

FWIW I wouldn't want Adkins back either

In all fairness, whilst I do agree with the overall consensus that potential cannot be adequately identified until a higher level of maturity, if we simply stopped recruiting under the age of 14 then the promising kids will still be recruited by satellite academies, it just wouldn't be ours The trick is to have a bit of both, clubs around the UK have a different model of youth recruitment. I think Brentford changed tack completely to move to a system of binning off the academy in general and only, like you say, pick up players released from other academies... thats fine, and saves a chunk of youth budget, but you then rely on your success through the players you have picked up and no longer have a chance of picking up a young player under 11 that 'makes it' There is of course an issue with players falling out of love for the game through sheer volume of coaching at a young age, but that is more of a symptom of how coaching works at those ages, so change the way you do it rather than stop it altogether 'Why is our academy output broken ?' Its probably a multitude of issues, changing recruitment/youth heads probably doesn't help, as well as academies of clubs our size being cyclical. We were in league 1 ten years ago, that probably caused us problems with youth recruitment at the time, and now being a prem club it means that those recruited 10 years ago need to be at a higher pedigree then they probably were signed for at the time, and have less opportunity available to them

Im not convinced that there is a huge amount of confusion about it, unfortunately I think the majority of people see kneeling as a 'them and us' movement, in a similar way to the fact that we have a vocal minority on social media arguing about the merits of the LGBT month or MOBO's Personally, Im not convinced that taking the knee is having any more affect for the issues at large, it now just feels like an empty symbol. But the 'it has links to the BLM political group' is just nonsense that has debunked over and over and is used as an excuse to ignore the greater message at play, if there was not a BLM link.. there would be another reason to ignore the message too Nothing will change as long as the governing body see any racial events within the sport as arbitrary compared to many other problems such as financial fair play and ESL challenges etc At the end of the day, if the players still accept that what they are doing is a worthwhile symbolic gesture then I will support that right, if you don't support it, thats fine, ignore it... but to boo it shows a lack of respect both to the players as well as the issues at large

Agreed Ive never seen the overall clamour for Eddie Howe really, yes he punched above his weight for a time at Bournemouth, but only really when they had a high level of investment. His playing style, very much like Ralphs, was high risk high reward and was eventually found out. Transfer speaking his overall record wasn't great, worth remembering, like Ralphs and managers before him, that isn't solely down to the manager, but also the scouting team. A lot of the current agenda against Ralph feels heavily recency biased. If we flip this season on its head then everyone would be talking about what a good recovery we had. Of course, the overall drop if form is indeed worrying. I am very much now in the sceptical camp, but Ive see enough to know Ralph knows what he is doing to be the best bet moving forward It isn't like we are in a position to fund a manager with a higher pedigree, who would also like a significant spend. So really what is this alternative to Ralph people want ? It certainly isn't Howe for me either

Id put Che Adams and Vestergaard both into the good signing categories with KWP Diallo’s early season for was very good, but still reserving judgement, similarly Salisu looks very promising Walcott I’m 50/50 on, he had a decent enough loan but 75k a month over a 2 year contract seems weighted in his favour Djenepo Id but down as a failure, but not a huge failure Overall transfers during the Ralph era havn’t been anywhere near the disaster of previous regimes

I find it quite funny how good signings are attributed to one man and bad another Reality was that we likely sign players based on a managers need, scouting consensus and a comittee agreement Paul Mitchell seemed to be the man that found a great many of our gems, and Ross Wilson a great many of our overpaid duff Ive got no love for Reed really but I’d be very surprised if it was just him going out of his way scouting and negotiating as one entity Our issues are/were a culmination of Gao rocking up and providing no direction, bad chief scout/manager appointments and this weird power vacuum that both Krueger (what was the point in him) and Reed seemed to be vying for and neither accepted ultimate responsibility

After putting up with you on Saintweb and twitter for the past decade I can’t say Im overly surprised he hasn’t reached out

I’d find it very surprising, after Semmens words on Gao at the fans forum that effectively lobbed him/his tenure under the bus, if there wasn’t something happening in the background We can only hope that we are taken on by somebody with integrity and a will to drive us forward instead of chancers looking to take on a club to add to an investment portfolio for a few years

I’m done with him to be honest. Absolutely done For me, he is the worst kind of footballer, within which he HAS ability but rarely has the aptitude to actually use it... certainly not in any meaningful way - Consistently blames others for his poor passes, tactical reaction or tracking back - He’s given about 3 pens away this year by literally running into people in the box - Despite actually being a good dribbler of the ball he literally NEVER takes his man on... preferring to stop play... I actually thought this was a tactical thing but its been consistent over every manager he’s ever played for - Bad footballing brain, often choosing to just sky it from 30 yards instead of finding a pass, recycling possession or dribbling - That fucking grin and surprised exclamation he has when one of his ‘wasteful’ shots doesn’t come off... He did it yesterday when he missed from 7 yards out 😂😫 It beggars belief that we played him infront of an inform Che after his Scotland call up and Tella over the last 2/3 games.... how the fuck did he get 90 mins yesterday

Huge performance from a morale perspective yesterday and obviously has the added bonus that we will be in another Wembley semi final (that we won't be able to attend......😫) More so than what it meant to us as a fan I think it was required to reaffirm direction, and although I do feel like we are safe, I think its important to carry on this momentum into our next couple of games. The whole team in general performed brilliantly, it was for me, a performance that has been significantly lacking for a while (as we all know). The players, for want of any other descriptives, turned up. We showed a level of passion, work ethic, decisiveness and responsibility in key areas that we just haven't seen since January. Diallo again is hugely impressive for me, its vitally important that we have a player of his quality to fill in for Romeu (and I actually think ID's dynamism is more important). KWP again showing why he is a vital piece of this side and the way we play Redmond, what a performance, one that we have all been waiting for from him. Im not going to jump to any conclusions here, in a similar vein as to how I held back my thoughts when he was out of form. Simply put, Redmond has this performance in his locker, but for some reason that I haven't ever been able to fathom we just do not see it with any consistency. Far too often in games we cry out for a player to take on their man, commit the fullback and CB if nothing more than to create space. Is that a mental issue or a tactical one ? Hopefully we see more of it moving forward.

I don't really understand some of the bluster on here to prioritise the league, we are still effectively a 40-1 shot, I'm not entirely sure our premier league survival is going to pivot on how we do against Championship opposition leading into an international break Frankly, if we fail to survive, it won't come down to the squad we put out tomorrow, it will because we were not able to overcome our general malaise over the last and next month Survival is still VERY MUCH in our hands, and we could, quite conceivably already be safe. But in all likely hood another 3-6 points will see us secure the chance to wallow around premier league mid table next year. We have every chance of getting to another semi final, which would at the very least give the fan base and squad something to motivate them and lift morale. I for one will be hugely dissapointed if Ralph decides to field an under strengthed or under motivated team for this

I think its quite lazily written to be honest, that Gagenpress of which we use a derivative of is effectively a press triggered and carried out mainly in the last third of the pitch, and both us and Liverpool use a long ball (or used to) from the defence into a 'weak' area of the opposition in order to trap them What I am saying is that overall the biggest taxation to the squad would be in the attacking quartet and midfielders, but their injuries don't really follow that trend. In fact, the overall majority of Liverpools injuries have been contact related. Of course, you could argue that playing this way with injury prone players such as Ings and Walcott has accelerated their time off the pitch, and one 'could' argue this is exaggerated by the schedules and the fact that we are unable to use a lot of our rehab facilities due to covid restrictions, but ultimately moving away from this philosophy isn't easy for a coach such as Ralph or Klopp That being said, I do still carry an issue with the overall footballing decisions to release the players we did out on loan when it was evident that this season will be incredibly taxing for us, both because of the way we play and because of the compressed schedule. I'm still not convinced the overall injuries are systemic of tactics though, and us and Liverpool are not isolated cases. Crystal Palace for instance have one of the longest injury lists and they play in with a much more compact and mechanical game-plan, so realistically the injury crisis' we see across the whole of the Premier league is largely due to the strain of attempting to play the number of games we have had to in such a small space of time It's only going to get worse, not only do we have a compact schedule this year, but we are squeezing in a Euros at the end of it, and then 2022 has a world cup effectively early season as well

Considering our current predicament I imagine that a lot of the waiting was to see where we ended up at the end of this season. This probably affects the negotiations on both ends to be honest. Relegation obviously affects the price and the overall saleability of the club in general, would the parties still be interested in a large club, with large outlay no longer receiving Prem payments and under the cloud of a restrictive loan agreement ? An FA Cup win will probably flip the favour to that of Gao/Kat, European entry will of course increase the potential price etc So for me its not beyond the realms of possibility that potential consortiums are waiting for our position to become a bit more clear, plus the overall impact of Covid on football in general probably becomes more clear this summer. A release to clubs to allow spectators back is massive for balance sheets etc Hopefully, all being well, we can be under new ownership come the summer, or at least headed into that direction... a lot depends on how desperate Gao is to release control and regain funds. As per Jordan/Reed etc, I'm not sure I really care much.... Reed gets a terrible terrible time on here but it seems to me he was pretty integral at building the clubs background footballing facilities such as the medical science/training ground/academy structure. It obviously all went wrong when he gained more power and involved himself more with recruitment.