brummie

Aye, we only employ people called Steve now. Cheers for the insight. The only real hope I suppose is that one of the Steves can drill the players on tactics and formations while Bruce does whatever it is he does and it doesn't end up like it did with Carver and Pardew. Slim hope.... There's another one, I guess Clemence has gone with him?

Hi Thanks for the nice words In the early days, we were in the championship, we'd just emerged from a spell of - no exaggeration - 5 or 6 years of utterly horrifying bilge. Anything was an improvement. We were playing shit teams, so winning far more. For a while, the loan players he brought in started to click a little and things looked better. Bruce's problems really emerge when the team is up against it - he starts blaming all and sundry, everyone but himself - the fans, the players, pretty much anyone. He lost a lot of support when he started doing that. He also played the "some of them will never like me because I used to manage Blues" card, which is exactly what you're going to hear re Sunderland at some point. What you have to understand about him is that he doesn't really have a football ethos - he is from the MON brand of 'slap them on the back, get them pumped up and send them out there' management. That works to a certain degree, but no further. Beyond that, it really is up to the players to make things happen, because they'll get no tactical guidance from the manager. The best example of those limitations is what happened in the play off final against Fulham. The contrast between us (barely a shot on goal) and Fulham, a team set up to play in a certain, attacking style, was brutally clear. The other thing about Bruce is that he's a 'streaky' manager - he'll go on decent winning runs, then launch into a horrific run. I think that's partly because his 'gee the lads up' style tends to mean that his teams are confidence teams - when it is there, they'll do alright, when it's not, it's horrible viewing. There are worse managers out there, for sure, but he's very much one of the type where, if their team plays some nice stuff, it's mostly because they've stumbled across it themselves rather than through any way the manager has sent them out to play. Has he brought Steve Agnew with him? His arrival with us (he didn't join when Bruce did) coincided with a slight uplift in attacking menace. If he has come, that's a good sign, a positive.

Tuanzebe did very well for us - when Bruce left and he started playing at centre back rather than right back, where Bruce always played him (where he struggled). I'd have liked him to come back to us for another season but we've bought two centre halves already.

It's a mixed bag though, to put it mildly. Trezeguet is the one that concerns me. Hause, Mings, El Ghazi were all with us last season. Wesley looks decent. Jota figure is misleading, as it was actually Gary Gardner plus 2m which is a great deal. As i have said before, we were down to a squad of 15 players and had lost a lot of our best ones back to loans ending. Heaton is a very good signing. Oh and forgot, no idea what Nakamba is like.

It’s not too uncommon now. Most promoted clubs go for it and spend the TV money to try and compete. They also have very few assets who will go for huge money to affect their ‘net spend’. We have the third richest owners in English football too, which helps. The Sawiris family are eye wateringly minted and Wes Edens isn't short of a few quid either Most importantly, they're not just throwing money in and hoping for the best, they've appointed a coach with a good paying style and the brief to get the whole club playing that way, appointed a head of recruitment (Pitarch) who has put together a Europe wide scouting system and put in place a CEO who has done the job at Chelsea and Liverpool. Apparently they had two plans - players they wanted, basically - put together last season, one for if we stayed down, one for if we went up. That's the sort of sensible spending we didn't have with Lerner, who threw money in and let MON run things Exactly what Fulham fans were saying last Summer. Came up thinking their spending and “playing style” would rip up the Premier League too. Instead the Premier League ripped them up Which I predicted Of course, the notable point there is that i made no mention of our spending power and playing style 'ripping up the league'. Oh, I really can't do this circular conversation any more. http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/c6DIpCp1922KQ/giphy.gif

It’s not too uncommon now. Most promoted clubs go for it and spend the TV money to try and compete. They also have very few assets who will go for huge money to affect their ‘net spend’. We have the third richest owners in English football too, which helps. The Sawiris family are eye wateringly minted and Wes Edens isn't short of a few quid either Most importantly, they're not just throwing money in and hoping for the best, they've appointed a coach with a good paying style and the brief to get the whole club playing that way, appointed a head of recruitment (Pitarch) who has put together a Europe wide scouting system and put in place a CEO who has done the job at Chelsea and Liverpool. Apparently they had two plans - players they wanted, basically - put together last season, one for if we stayed down, one for if we went up. That's the sort of sensible spending we didn't have with Lerner, who threw money in and let MON run things

They couldn't get a work permit for him.

Once we had lost our loan players and ditched the over the hill (Jedinak, Whelan, Adomah et al) and the leeches (Richards, McCormack) we had a squad of 16 players left. How we were supposed to compete without buying players is beyond me. The similarity to Fulham ends with spending money - we've identified our targets (manager and director of recruitment) and gone out and bought most of them by early July, players for positions where we needed people. What I don't understand is Gallowgate End simultaneously thinks your own club are nuts for not spending (on account of your awful owner) yet at the same time finds it perplexing that someone else is. What on earth are we meant to do? Don't buy in players = struggle. Buy in players = struggle? Fulham went out and bought a load of players where they already had depth, ignored the areas where they were weak and did most of their spending in the last days of the window.

Trabzonspor take kit unveiling to a whole new level. Excellently done.

I see Bruce just saying on SSN that he's in charge of transfers. Not what you want to hear.

I saw that as well, and thought the same, it looked fucking horrible.

Apparently we've signed Douglas Luiz from Man City.

I almost hope they finish top four now just so you stop with this weirdness. It's also worth pointing out that of all those players Fulham bought, five of them came on the last day of the transfer window. We're doing lots of buying, but we're doing it at the start of July, there's a difference. In the post season we released: Jedinak Hutton Elphick Adomah Whelan De Laet Bunn Richards McCormack Gardner (although we swapped him plus £2m for Jota from our unwashed neighbours) We also lost, due to loans ending: Abraham Tuanzebe El Ghazi (who we then signed permanently) Mings (who we then signed permanently). I don't know what we can do other than sign players when losing so many (most of whom were shit anyway). And there are still plenty more destined to go: Hogan (who we spent 12m on!), Tshibola, Barnason, maybe Lansbury, Moreira, Kalinic, Bree.

Oh and he wasted a huge amount of money and sold all our centre halves bar one by the time this last season started. On the flip side, he bought John McGinn for 2.3m which is the best spent couple of million I've seen in a long long time.

I think he'll probably keep you up. The problem is, the football will be awful - he is straight out of the MON 'slap them on the back and get them fired up' school. He doesn't 'do' tactics. The closest he came with us was - and this is bizarre - a long diagonal punt from the keeper to a well-advanced-up-the-pitch El-Mohammedy. It happened so often it had to be a planned 'thing' Also, nothing is ever his fault, never. He had the fans on his side for a long time at our place but it was the constant flailing around looking for someone else to blame when things went wrong that lost him that - at which point he started blaming the fans too. Very quickly you'll get stuck of hearing 'we'll be there or thereabouts' as his answer to everything. You put up with a degree of the above if the results are worth it, or if the football was good to watch, but it isn't. It's relentlessly old school. You get away with that too a certain degree in the championship, but not in the top flight.

His son is a right arsey twat - posting piss taking stuff whenever we lost after his dad got sacked. Went strangely quiet when we then won ten games in a row. Bruceball. It's fucking grim. Guarantee you the first thing he'll do is try to sign James Chester.

Unfortunately Bruce was on a rolling contract with us too so wouldn't surprise me if that were true

I think we'll stay up. The Fulham thing is nonsense, like. As if the sensible thing to do would be not to sign new players.

What's it like being a Villa fan atm? Optimistic, I assume? I tell you the big thing. Until we went down, we'd had six or seven years where I hated going to the matches. Going down (although ideally it would not have been for three years) at least meant I started enjoying going to matches again. Smith's impact this season was remarkable. Winning ten matches on the bounce to easily qualify for the play offs when we'd been 13th in March was incredible. The major thing is the new owners. They're both super-rich, which helps, but as you guys (and us with Lerner) have seen, that's not a guarantee of them doing what they say they will. So far, though, they've been brilliant. We've sold more season tickets than for 40 plus years, apparently, there's a degree of optimism that we are starting to recover. We'd pretty much all take staying up next season, at this point, though. This season there was a really clear bond between fans and players too (that's one reason Mings is so popular). Someone said something somewhere (twitter probably) the other day - that for years he'd loved the club but for the first time in a while, he loved the team too. Which I thought was about right. If you'd said just over a year ago when I left Wembley after losing to Fulham in that play off final - you're about to narrowly avoid a winding up order, get bought by some extremely rich, benevolent people, struggle for a bit, ditch Bruce, appoint a progressive coach who tries to play the right way, put together a record winning run and then go up through the play offs, I would have thought you were fucking insane, honestly.

This. Also, Hause made permanent - word is that James Chester's totally fucked. Forced (by Bruce) to play through the pain barrier far too much last season.

Not a prayer - that is exactly the sort of signing we've been told we're staying away from.

If you look at our squad last season, we had Abraham, Tuanzebe, Mings, El Ghazi, Hause all on loan. Purely to replace the loan players was going to cost money, there's no getting away from it, it was going to involve players coming in. All this talk about doing a Fulham, though - what are we meant to do? Attempt to stay up without spending money? The new owners are doing what they said they'd do, even though injecting money is harder these days. They've pulled the stadium into a different company and done several share issues for 30m or so each time, so they are doing things the right way. End of the day, a huge amount of activity was always going to have to happen this summer. It's no surprise. I am just glad the new owners are finding ways to put so much cash in now, because - and remember, we were literally days away from a winding up order last summer - the club needs it desperately.

The cabbage thing worked for us.

5/6 is not nearly certain Its when the bookies suspend betting that you need to worry Ryder is tweeting betting suspended on Bruce New manager markets are closed overnight by most bookies. Any football journalist with half a brain would be aware of that. For all the 'the bookies know something' stuff on here, the odds are just reflecting where people are putting their money, nothing more than that, so I'm not really sure it's worth getting too concerned over that. It's like with us under Lerner. Every time we were looking for a manager, Bob Bradley would spent a while as hot favourite work the bookies. Purely because half wit punters would pile on purely because he's American. Finally, new manager markets are very small, it only takes a relatively small amount of money on someone to move the odds disproportionately. This message brought to you by the British Council For Not Worryong.

The other thing about Bruce getting the job would be you'd suffer from exactly the same MINDMELTINGLY ANNOYING thing we used to get about McLeish, and also to a lesser extent about Bruce. No matter how awful the results, no matter how dreadful the football, no matter how abject the lack of ambition the team shows, if you criticise Bruce, you'll get told by pricks like Danny Murphy that it's "because he used to manage Sunderland" that you don't like what he does. You could play 9 at the back week after week, never get out of your own penalty box, let alone your half, fail to even try to mount attacks and STILL they'll tell you it's because he used to manage Sunderland that you're moaning. And then, after a while, he'll start using it as an excuse himself. Jesus. Just remembering all that shit has made me feel like puking up a kidney.