brummie

Sunderland really don't look that bad, do they?

The English clubs being competitive on any level (CL/EL) is good imo, I enjoy watching English teams in European competitions. I'd rather see Arsenal win the Champions League by beating Barca, Juve, Bayern than Leicester lose every game in the group stages next season and go out with 0 points. The finances of our game are fucked and have been for some time, in the current situation the gap between teams will grow further and further. Leicester winning the league will not change that. I don't want Leicester to win the league to change football finances - I don't want the rich English clubs to do well in Europe, and the financial reasons is only one side. I'd rather eat my own liver than watch Arsenal win the champions league.

Having said that, this is a fucking awful game.

No way like Really? Take Mahrez and Kante out of that team and you are left with a relegation-battling side. They have players playing far above their potential because of the situation they are in, similarly to when we were 5th. We didn't have the 5th best team in the league that year, we had one or two class players and a load of average ones playing above their stations. The overrating of their players is unbelievable, they're really not very good Fair play to how they are playing etc. but nobody can tell me that their squad is any better than someone like Stoke or Everton. Aye take their two best players off them because that's just a totally fair and reasonable thing to do Innit. Like taking the two best players off any club wouldn't have an impact. I don't really have any feelings one way or the other for Leicester but what they've done in the last twelve months is absolutely remarkable and if they win will constitute one of the most Gobsmacking things in the English game for decades. Since Forest I reckon. There's a Lesta lass at work and every week she's like wtf? We're going to win the league. And even then, they had one of the best managers in the game and hadn't spent the previous season rooted to the bottom of the league. Although, that's why for me Clough is the greatest British manager ever, what he achieved there, he built a club out of nothing. This Leicester, though, it has been incredible, week after week expecting it to go tits up and it hasn't and look where they are now, it's just incredible.

I'll never understand why fans of English clubs who are not in the Champions League would want to see the teams that are do well. It just skews the finances of the game even more. Why would anyone possibly have any affinity for that sort of outcome? Why give one tenth of one flying fuck if the Champions do abysmally in the CL? I have to say, figures, that going through a team's squad and suggesting that the individuals aren't very good whilst ignoring the fact that they are living proof of the value of team work when you yourself have spent the last several years seeing week after week how a squad of decent players but no actual "team" is not enough is pretty insane.

No way like Really? Take Mahrez and Kante out of that team and you are left with a relegation-battling side. They have players playing far above their potential because of the situation they are in, similarly to when we were 5th. We didn't have the 5th best team in the league that year, we had one or two class players and a load of average ones playing above their stations. The overrating of their players is unbelievable, they're really not very good Fair play to how they are playing etc. but nobody can tell me that their squad is any better than someone like Stoke or Everton. Aye take their two best players off them because that's just a totally fair and reasonable thing to do Innit. Like taking the two best players off any club wouldn't have an impact. I don't really have any feelings one way or the other for Leicester but what they've done in the last twelve months is absolutely remarkable and if they win will constitute one of the most Gobsmacking things in the English game for decades.

No way like Really? Take Mahrez and Kante out of that team and you are left with a relegation-battling side. They have players playing far above their potential because of the situation they are in, similarly to when we were 5th. We didn't have the 5th best team in the league that year, we had one or two class players and a load of average ones playing above their stations. The overrating of their players is unbelievable, they're really not very good Fair play to how they are playing etc. but nobody can tell me that their squad is any better than someone like Stoke or Everton. EDIT - a key point in this is the fact that they've had a settled side all season with no injuries or suspensions. They have players playing better than you'd expect because of the position they are in? That position being top of the league? And how did they get there?

Leicester are like a Martin O'Neill Villa side, except tighter at the back, luckier with injuries, with a prolific striker and ten percent better at pretty much everything. They haven't played very well in the last few of their games I've seen, but then again, playing poorly and still grinding out results is definitely a sign of a championship winning side Ferguson's man United were brilliant at that

Incidentally, the bottom three are a fucking great example of how mismanagement can fuck up football clubs. All they had to do was show the bare minimum of nous - even more than spending money - and rake it in while worse organised newly promoted clubs got relegated. Instead you now have clubs like us, you and Sunderland looking like relics while the likes of Watford and Bournemouth cope with the modern game It isn't money that has really done for us, it is idiotic 'management' and terrible appointments

Fucking Norwich. Theres a lot to be said for getting it sorted as early as you can. I was all prepared for the remaining lightly burning ember of my giving a shit about our season to be snuffed out but fucking Norwich killed that hope off. This is all weird. Four years of escaping in the last week or so means I'd accepted we'd eventually fail to escape, but I'd assumed it'd be a last week or two thing. We've actually been down since we shamefully didn't spend anything in January, though, so we've had all this time to get used to it. Every single villa fan I know wanted it to be mathematically confirmed yesterday. That feels like the earliest point at which we can start to rebuild. Although we can't properly do that until the useless pampered manchild who got bored of playing with daddy's money finally fucks off.

Not a bad Championship manager tbf. Nah. I don't mind Bruce, but we've just cleared out the entire board, sacked the manager, sacked the CEO, sacked the technical director and the director of recruitment is on borrowed time. The last thing they're going to do is anything which would even remotely alienate the fans more. On the bright side, the new board - Hollis as CEO (admittedly, I don't know much about him, but he appointed the rest), Mervyn King, David Bernstein, Adrian Bevington, Brian Little - look infinitely more clued up. Some of the shit they've found from the previous regime is shocking. Head of scouting for Portugal and Spain - a journalism student. Head of scouting for Germany - emigrated to Australia. Players Garde was told didn't want to come in january turn out, when Garde speaks to them after, not to have been spoken to at all by us. Just fucking shocking. Garde was properly hung out to dry in January, treated abysmally, but at the same time, he should have got more out of the squad than he did, he had pretty much zero effect on us.

My only hope is that relegation forces the price down and we attract a decent buyer. It is just mind boggling that he allowed things to get as bad as that article describes them.

Check out some of the incompetence in this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/03/26/aston-villa-ready-to-part-company-with-remi-garde/ Staggering, just staggering. We make you lot look well run.

Shame Villa fans didn't feel that way 7 years ago. Aye, it was nice when the villa fans were really sympathetic towards the Newcastle fans that day. I hope you down 2 or 3 times and never come back. Fuck off. Oh, put your knickers on, maybe yourself a nice cup of tea and calm down, love.

Spurs fans yesterday joining in - and a couple of times actually starting - "Lerner Out" chants, plus a "we want your villa back". I know it's easy to be magnanimous when you're winning, but sometimes football fans realise there's much that unites them than divides them, and the "could have been us" thing kicks in. Meanwhile as this was going on, villa had the stewards heavy handedly taking Lerner Out banners off people. Even the Birmingham mail - about as supine a local paper as you'll find anywhere - has turned on the club. When you're confiscating season tickets from people because they sang about the owner, you're losing control.

Our situation mirrors yours pretty closely in so many ways. In a league awash with fucking money, it should be literally impossible to have a premier league club have a manager's position no fucker will touch with a barge pole, people should be falling over themselves to get it. It takes some doing, that.

Players look nervous as fuck, as well as if they've not been told what to do - it's all very shapeless.

You watch Bournemouth, giving it all they can, not giving up, showing spirit, and then you look at clubs like your lot and my lot, and think, do we really deserve to be in the top flight and these lot not in it?

I'm aware you don't want to hear this, but I'm watching your match, and you look just like us.

I'm really starting to think we might go down as well. *nods seriously*

Three things have happened. 1. Lost all interest overnight. 2. Appoints morons. 3. Ambition ends at not getting relegated. It's easy to look at the players or the manager and think "they're fucking rubbish, they are" but that's only half the story, the air of couldn't-give-a-fuck acceptance of mediocrity starts right at the top and trickles down. What riles me most is that these people running the club have zero feeling for it, they just don't "get it", and as a result, they have no shame, no embarrassment. I hear things like us having our worst home record in our 141 year history, or little things like last night and us winning our first corner - CORNER - in three games, plus all the other records of recent years, and I am fucking ashamed. These people running things have no concept of that. Their only involvement in the general level of protest and disenchantment is to take on body guards (CEO, director of recruitment, technical director apparently all have them now) and confiscate season tickets from people who chant dissent. Confiscate them? They should be fucking refunding them.

We can't even begin to recover from this until Lerner goes. I was just watching some interviews with fans leaving the game on the Birmingham Mail website. The recurring theme was "they've removed the soul from the club, they've killed the identity" and that's absolutely right. We've been drained of ambition, had cretins appointed at all managerial levels and just been parked to "get by" as best we can. We've got a CEO who actually tells us not to just look at the on-pitch stuff, because we've got a great new shirt deal which will still be great even if we get relegated, and a new chairman who openly referred to us as "customers" until at an open meeting the other day, someone stood up and demanded that he stop using that word. I saw most of the games in our last relegation season, 86-7, and although that too was pretty horrible, it at least felt like it was something that could be turned around by changing the manager (which is exactly what happened). This time, though, it feels like the malignant factor is at the top, the chairman, and it won't change until he goes. Lerner's biggest failing is appointing idiots. I can't think of a single person he has appointed who has worked out, not one. When he bought us, I recall reading Cleveland Browns fans warning us about precisely that - he can't make appointments to save his life. Too right he can't.

Rumours are they've sacked one of our mascots (Bella the lion). During the match, she sits on an upturned dustbin, watching it. When Everton scored their second last night, she got up, and theatrically got into the bin, implying that that was rubbish (and it fucking was, believe me). Not seen for the second half. Rumours they sacked her. They've already been taking down banners and taking season tickets off people for singing anti Lerner songs. They're absolutely horrible people.

My brother was at our match at Stoke yesterday. Said that when their second one went in, bloke just down from him sat down, got his Kindle out and just spent the rest of the match reading. I don't blame him. It really sums us up.