Matt1892

The view at Turf Moor today.

Willock is our second best midfielder when he is fit and has a run in the team.

Our first home win since the Fulham game before Christmas. Much needed. Hopefully he can build off the back of that and get our season back on track. Results were looking good too until West Ham turned it around.

He has had a few issues with injuries but would be an improvement on Burn in almost every attribute in the left/centre back role.

Kieran Maguire has said Villa are about to post a record loss of £138 million soon, they have already reported this to UEFA. It will be one of the biggest losses of any European team for last year.

Again, it isn’t a simple case of being 7th regarding wage bill so we should be 7th in the league. In the same was a as saying we have the 7th most expensive squad in the league so should be 7th. there are more factors to it than that, which you have agreed with with your example of Man Utd and Brighton.

Edit your original post rather than quoting the same post multiple times.

There are more intricacies to it than purely the wage bill, for example not every players ability is a true reflection of the wage they earn, as well as some players earning more dependent on age, seniority and their status before joining the club, such as arriving on a free transfer etc. I don’t think anyone would argue that Everton have a better squad of players compared to Brighton, due to the latter having the superior scouting network that has allowed them to bring in high quality players at a lower cost, yet by your logic Everton being lower than them is down to manager magic.

The logic that we should settle around where our wage bill is in the league, with anything higher being a manager miracle and anything lower is bad management is nonsense.

We do have a good run in and hopefully we can build some momentum, starting against Wolves. The worry is not that we stutter along until the end of the season, which would be painful enough, but that we go in to free fall and start dropping points on a regular basis. I was critical of the club last summer for not buying for the positions where we lacked quality to take us to the next level, the injuries this season have highlighted much worse like having a back up keeper completely unsuited to our tactics. How this wasn’t picked up in training I don’t know. We are 2 or 3 players from having a top quality team, we just need to play like we believe we are.

The biggest issue at the moment is that there are no signs of turning it around, even after a good display or result we have not been able to build any momentum off the back of it, which is the big worry. Maybe the international break after the Chelsea game will give us a chance to reset, we are stumbling along at the moment and we play like a bottom half Premier League team with no tactics or ideas. If you think back to last season the patterns we put together down the right between Trippier, Bruno and Almiron that pulled the opposition all over the place, these are long gone and instead we play like Man Utd under Ten Hag now, where we appear to have no real game plan on how we are going to open up the opposition. I don’t know what the answer is and I don’t want us to make any rash decision. However, if these inconsistent performances go on until the end of the season then a decision is going to have to be made, as we don’t want to be changing manager midway through the following season. The whole issue with Ashworth resigning complicates the situation even more.

Well done Dubs.

Good tackle Longstaff.

Tino is so good.

Great save from Dubs with the first attempt.

Blimey.

Bruno is an idiot at times.

Good movement from Gordon for that.

That’s because Liverpool poach other clubs 16 year olds and pass them off as being developed with them.

We just had a shot!

Dubs man of the match for us so far.

We are letting them dictate the pace of the game.

Blackburn are really poor, we should win this even more comfortable than we beat Sunderland .

A manager can prefer players with Premier League experience and still sign players who have never played here. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. There is also no issue with the above.

The way to solve it would be to have an aligned transfer and wage cap for all Premier League clubs, that you can go up to by either turnover or owner proof of funds. Which could be along the lines of £200 million net spend on transfers and a £350 million wage bill per season.