Nine

Come on

If Villa can maintain their consistency at home they should stay within touching distance of top 4 all season, as always though the common denominator will be down to luck with fitness and injuries.

Needs to mature physically, but has real potential in the mid/long term. Great showing today.

Trippiers finger is fucked

Embarrassing behaviour for a captain

Bodied

“Is gonna run wild on you brother”

The delusion shown by some football fans is genuinely scary

One of the problems is our quick rise over the last 24 months has made it very easy for the journos to target the low hanging fruit as far as our fanbase goes. If we had a gradual build of momentum towards success they would still question Howe for the money spent, but the knives would be harder to sharpen had we not seen almost instantaneous success on the field and then feel it drop away a bit due to the squad being massacred by fitness issues. All I’m saying is, we should all be prepared for the idiots to come out of the woodwork and question management because we are heading into a rough patch with the squad as limited as it is. There were fans questioning Howe after the Liverpool result, let alone a sustained drop off in form. And we don’t even know for sure how much of a drop off it will end up being, if at all. But it is a big test for any manager.

Your success in the 90’s laid the foundations to go on and be able to sign some of the worlds best players, spend ridiculous amounts of money and have an elite infrastructure from top to bottom. It has absolutely everything to do with how you’ve maintained relative success, despite your comedown since Ferguson retired you’ve been able to spend and compete because of the success he and his sides delivered. I won’t argue the injury point, it’s completely correct and fair enough.

The players that are available are so gassed, the whole squad needs the upcoming break. We have looked flat since the first minute.

Im not sure he will get much of a look in for as long as Southgate is manager, you don’t get the best out of Gordon while using the slow and methodical build up style of play that England favour at the moment. As much as the lad probably wants to be included and how happy we’d all be for him, it’s better for us this way for now anyway.

Longstaff will start as the 6

Fine margins in these games, Joes header goes in and it’s different. We were up against it with our current injury/suspension list and we gave it a good shot. It’s unfortunate, but this young squad will learn lessons that last a lifetime from these types of games. Proud of the side tonight.

Just better tonight, coming up against a side like these with our current limitations was always a big ask. A good effort tonight.

Staying consistently fit in the Saudi league is a bit different than doing it in our system in the PL tbf.

It would be easy to assume that the increased schedule this season would be the cause, high intensity games against elite sides in the toughest competition in the world is going to invite increased risk of injury right? But the thing that hurts is a few are just unlucky freak occurrences. Burn, Murphy and Anderson specifically. Isak and Botman are unfortunate because they are key players, but it’s to be expected that with that the system we play and a big increase in minutes with the CL games that we’d run into these muscle issues. And then there’s Tonali. It just adds more pressure onto those who are fit now too, they have to take on more minutes individually now and it increases the risk of losing more players. We need a decent run of luck until we get 2 or 3 players back fit.

I know when we go through a bad run of form or put out a bad performance he’s usually one of the players that gets the ‘needs to be upgraded’ treatment on here, but he has been the most consistent mainstay in the starting 11 since our rise from Jan 2022. An integral piece of the best defence in the league last year, and people are quick to forget that. He will be a huge miss, get well soon BDB.

The availability of Joelinton and Willock will mean this plays out alot differently from the first, if we can maintain momentum and not concede the first goal and there’s no reason we don’t come away with a result. Very difficult test though, especially when you consider how many players we have out.

Newcastle/Boro and Liverpool/Everton semis

Enjoyable night, the system is so well drilled that anyone seems to be able to step in and do well especially in a competition like this one.

Pope has been nowhere near bad enough to warrant dropping for Dubs, that’s a tad of an over reaction.. you risk destroying our best goalkeeper mentally to put in the second choice that is a level below.

He’s not an end game level keeper, but as we can’t just pick and choose which goalkeeper we want and need yet he is a good no. 1 to have. Take FFP and the market in general into account, this guy was a fucking steal.. errors included.

This whole thing will be a huge mental test for him, luckily we have a manager that we know is very well equipped to deal with the situation.

Our front 2 midfielders have to be on the high end physically, the press relies heavily on it. We can get away with a less physical more technical 6 like Bruno because of the physicality in front of him.. the current midfield functions more on the tactical integration and high physicality than good technical ability and I’m not sure that changes any time soon. Obviously the end goal is to have a front 2 of elite midfielders that can do it all, but that costs and we are some way yet from attracting the Bellinghams of the world.