brummie

I still hate Slaven Bilic for that awful piece of cheating/play acting which got Laurent Blanc booked and therefore out of the World Cup final. Absolute fucking cunt Croats should've ended up in the final that year, tbh. Class team, that was. Agree I'd also say that French footballers rank just above German WW2 veterans in my "buckets of sympathy" league.

I like Bilic. Someone should tell him that that ear ring looks really fucking 1980s, though. I love it when continental Europeans try to look cool, they all end up looking like an audience member from an episode of The Tube. See also: cricketers with diamond ear studs. Twats.

Modric = this year's Elano tbh.

For the whole of the second half of the season, every single time someone took a shot at Carson, i was convinced it was going in, and most of the time it did.

Honestly, can't the fucking news wait till full time? When did the BBC sink to near-ITV levels in their football coverage?

Here we go. Come on, Martin!

Reporting for duty. They've got no fucking money at all, hence their valuation of Barry at 10m then Crouch at 15, and previous offer of "a ragbag assortment of players" (MON). I hate the way they do business in the media. "Stevie G"'s bit about Barry last week makes me want to punch his pea sized head of his stupid fucking shoulders. I hate them.

Wish some of our lot would take notice too. He says that every summer though and then buys a Zat Knight on the last day! I'll be taking no advice from that strange little man. We want players NOW!!! Who then goes on to play a pretty important role for us in an excellent season where we progress five places and finish sixth. Although to be honest, that's not what I was forecasting at the time. I do think, though, that if you've got the manager you think you should have, then you've got to trust him to do his job. It is the first week in June and all over the internet, people are going mental because their club hasn't bought anybody (except for Spurs, and well, they've always been a bit peculiar). People of the internet - chill the fuck out.

First they came for the lager louts, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a lager lout. Ha ha, very good.

I don't see the relevance of what order clubs were taken over in. Villa only got taken over because Ellis decided he wanted to sell. We campaigned against him for years and years, and he always said he'd be taken out of Villa Park in a box. In the end, he left sooner, but only when he decided he wanted to, and he only decided that because he'd had five operations to fight cancer in just over 12 months. He won. Clubs only get sold if the people owning the major chunks of shares want to sell, no matter how attractive they are.

For fuck's sake, I come on here to read about Newcastle and all I get is Spurs this Spurs fucking that.

I was listening to TalkSport on the way home, and Danny Kelly was hosting a phone-in on whether football should be there for Gazza and what the sport should do to help him. I couldn't help but wonder what Danny Kelly and his showbiz mates Chris Evans and Danny Baker were doing to help him at the moment, given that they did their utmost to appear in the media out on the piss with Gazza for most of the 1990s.

Better deal for Villa if true. Surely Barry is worth more than £10million? Load of shite this story. I know the fee we're going to tell them we want has been decided (not playing the ITK card, but don't ask, I can't divulge) and it is a much bigger package than that.

I think Sidwell is a more than decent player, to be fair. I'd be happy if we bought him - not as a replacement for Barry per se, but as we need strength in depth in a lot of areas, including midfield.

Going back to the original post, about Barry going to Liverpool. To be entirely honest, given the choice, I'd rather he stayed. Mainly because if the chasing pack flog their better players to the Sky 4 whenever they come knocking, not a lot will change. However, having said that, I've said this for ages now - some of you will recall it - Barry has had at best half a season this year, at very best. He went missing for a considerable length of time. He's an excellent player, but if you asked me who our three most influential players have been this season, I'd say Young, Laursen and Bouma, not Barry. I reckon he'll go, and I reckon he'll regret it in the long term, but maybe that's wishful thinking. We'll buy someone to replace him and move on. We'll have even more money to spend (although to be fair, the right players as part of the deal would solve a lot of our problems), and we've got some really excellent prospects in the youth team (Bannan, Forrester, Delfouneso) so things will still look pretty bright.

I'm as cynical as they get, but i can't fault the new regime, they've been very classy in everything they've done so far. After the Ellis years it has been incredibly refreshing.

Give a man a fish He eats for a day Teach him how to fish He eats forever. Arrested Development, 1993.

It wasn't the club who handed the shirts out. It was Olof Mellberg in his last game, he bought 3200 of them and gave one to every Villa fan at Upton Park, paid for them himself, with Mellberg - Thanks For Your Support on the back.

Arr.

Crouch is too tall to wear vertical stripes. He should really join QPR or Celtic. /Gok_wan

kung po prawn chicken chow mein great leap forward ROOOOOONEEEEEYYYYY!!!!!

I'm getting to the point now where I think the BBC should be prohibited from doing football coverage. As should Sky and ITV. Esp ITV. I may get some big fuck off satellite dish and watch all my football with chinese commentary.

That'll be another 2m, you goatee wearing fat cunt.

Good. I don't fancy seeing that peanut headed cocksucker Gerrard urging him to join Liverpool in the morning.

Agreed, I think different players want different things. Some will want to feel wanted, some will just want money, others will want a lifestyle which fits whatever circumstances they have at the time. A player who is married with no kids might want London, a player with kids might want something away from a city where his kids can get out and about. Then there are the distorting factors. I once saw Paul Merson on SSN, and they were talking about Boro. They asked him why a certain player (dont remember who) had gone to Boro and he said "for the same reason anyone goes to Boro - the money. I know that's why I went there". England's starting striker in their last friendly plays for Portsmouth, having moved there from Spurs this season. If it were as simple as "X > Y" then who on earth would go to Pompey? Personally, I think London is one of the biggest distorting factors, especially for foreign players. If Spurs, Newcastle, Villa, Everton were all in the same place, there's no real reason to expect Modric to opt for Spurs out of that choice, but he's a 22 year old Croatian given the chance to move to a country where he probably only knows other footballers, and has never lived before. The fact that one club is in a city which is one of three or four global "megacities" is going to have a massive influece. There are plenty of other factors like this which attract players to clubs and put them off others.