Andy

Don't come at me with facts Stephen, this is a football forum.

It's easy to see why he picks up injuries given how he plays. Frustrating timing though, tomorrow is the ideal type of game for him.

The answer to why he's scoring more in the champions league is astonishingly simple: we've had more penalties. It's not some major mystery. As for his performances in general: as well as what he's already pointed out himself about motivation, there's definitely an argument that the fullbacks we've faced in most of our CL games have been worse defensively than your average PL fullback. Again I don't think there's much mystery to it, it's a combination of him looking less hungry in the PL, and PL fullbacks happily showing him the outside knowing he'll whip it out of play.

To be fair, every club in the league has those same systems in place, it doesn't stop obviously ill-fitting signings from happening.

As Vlad says, there aren't even that many occasions where I think "he should've had a pop there" from range, the way we build attacks means we're either breaking the lines frantically, or slowly working the ball wide allowing the opposition to keep us at arms length where shooting seems unviable.

Barnes is a much more effective left winger than Gordon. The only things gordon is better at are taking penalties and beating his man on the outside, which looks great but rarely comes to anything. His CL penalties are carrying him massively, he's spent the majority of this season and last offering almost nothing from the wing. His other killer attribute is how well he markets himself. His "nice to assist you" post to Isak summed him up, his entire persona is all about selling an image of himself that doesn't actually hold true to reality.

Wissa, so far (but not today), has looked a lot better at attacking the box. He's actually missing chances unlike Wolte who never really looks a threat, which was even true when he was scoring. If you combined the two you'd have a complete striker, but as it is, it looks like we have two players with completely opposite flaws to their game.

Amorim was always the problem. Carrick hasn't had to do anything groundbreaking, he's just switched to a formation that actually suits his extremely expensive squad of players.

There are plenty of other threads in which you can voice your concerns, we don't need another one.

His passing is sloppy as fuck, and on more than one occasion he was flailing his arms blaming Miley/Barnes for not being where the ball went, despite it literally just being a sloppy and lazy pass. Didn't think he defended too badly in the main but his standards on the ball have dropped massively.

Villa's centre halves are a lot better than the two clowns that were at the back for PSV, so that probably accounts for the difference there. I still think he'll do alright here in time but he looks miles off the pace at the moment in the league.

He was trying things and put in one good cross that Woltemade nearly got on the end of, but yeah. I feel like the bar has been lowered massively as to what constitutes a promising performance, at this stage I'm just happy to see him get the basics right and have a go.

It's obvious why people get annoyed with him, like. One good cross in every ten doesn't really make up for the other nine that result in momentum-killing goal kicks that gift control of the game back to the opposition. Certainly wasn't the only one guilty of it today, but when people feel he's being shoe-horned into the side despite his form being largely poor all season, it's inevitable that he's going to take his share of the criticism.

Looks our second best midfielder after Bruno.

He started off brightly when he came on and played one good through ball to Wissa (who did nowt with it) but otherwise never really imposed himself on the game. I thought there were worse performers today tbh but I'm still not seeing it with him.

Thiaw, Botman and Miley the only ones that have been good for the most part. Everyone else has been poor. Our attackers look like they've been called last minute to fill in and have never met each other before.

His passing is abysmal too. Painful after watching Miley use the ball so well from that position for a few weeks.

This opening half an hour is the best I've seen Villa play this season so far, they've mostly been scraping their way through games. I think that says more about how poor we've been than anything else, our midfield is wide open.

Have we watched them play this season? They score from range every week yet we're not closing them down.

Exactly this.

Can this ref tell the English ones that you're allowed to say no to VAR?

Only grievance I have with the side is Gordon left, Barnes right. Hopefully Gordon has his 1 in 5 performance where he looks arsed. Feel a bit for Miley too, I'd have more faith in him at fullback than the current iteration of Trippier, but I can see the leadership perspective.

And the other three have twisted about it for as long as I can remember, despite having much bigger squads.

You could be right, but I assumed he was Wilson's replacement personally, especially since I'm pretty sure we were chasing him before the Isak stuff kicked off.

ChatGPT can't possibly conceive that we employed Steve Bruce as a manager, so it just assumes we played him at centre half in his 60s. Smarter than I thought.