Christian Benteke

mirror wrote:

Villa are in confident mood after defeating league leaders Chelsea last weekend.

Benteke added: “We have beaten a fantastic team in Chelsea and we deserved to win, but now we must build on this. We want to finish this season as strongly as we can and in as high a position as we can.”

Villa came 15th last season and Benteke insists they are making good progress with the club currently 10th.

Benteke is then expecting even better for the club and himself next season.

He said: “For the moment, we are good. We are better than last season and this is important, to show progress and improvement and to try to be better.

“We are growing as a team and we are doing well. With the win over Chelsea, this is a sign of the way we are progressing.

“It’s not bad and we know we can do better, too. This is our objective in the weeks and months ahead. Next season we can be better again."

Firestarter wrote:I was thinking the same, John. That said, I still fancy Belgium to have a decent run in Brazil...hopefully Lukaku will shine and take the focus off Chris.

Lizard Licker wrote:A striker always has an offish second season. Last season, he was brand new and terrorised defences a lot more. This season, they've got to grips with him a bit more.

Next season if he stays, he'll be back to form I reckon.

mirror wrote:
By James Nursey | 26/03/14  

Christian Benteke's agent has admitted he will decide the Aston Villa striker's future after the World Cup.

Benteke is tied to the Villans until 2017 after signing a £40,000-a-week contract extension last summer, but that came after agent Eric Kismet advised him to hand in a transfer request.

Now, as the 23-year-old gears up to play for Belgium in this summer's finals in Brazil, Kismet has said: “He wants to get ready for the World Cup. For the future, there is time. Currently it is too early to talk about it.”

Villa Park officials have privately conceded the club may struggle to keep Benteke if he has a storming World Cup in Brazil.

Arsenal, Tottenham and AC Milan have been previously linked with 6ft 3in Benteke, who has 11 goals this term after netting 23 in his debut English season to help Villa beat relegation.

Chris Harte wrote:It would be nice if, just for once, we could tell the big(ger than us currently) clubs to get fucked.

Trotters wrote:Assuming he's sold, there'll be two possible scenarios:

1. The money will be used to rebuild the team.
2. Lerner will pocket the money.

Given that he's money hand over fist due to the utter incompetence of the last 7 years, it won't surprise me one bit if he pockets most of the money and tells Lambert (or whoever his next poor choice of a manager is) that he has to go unearth another gem.

I can't really blame Lerner. If I was stupid enough to plough thousands of dollars into a poker machine and not get a single win, I'd be overjoyed if it suddenly spat out 50 bucks.

And that's it in a nutshell. Lerner suffered from a gamblers curse where he just kept chasing his loses. He's realised now that it's fruitless and I think Villa will be just another mediocre team plodding about the premiership without making any real impact on it.

Of course, there are some that will tell you that it's the best we should hope for; that we can't expect anything better; that we don't have any god-given right to anything more substantial. Of course, those same people were all up in Doug's face for his lack of ambition yet for some reason, they're ok with Randy lacking ambition.

Maybe we become less passionate with age. Or maybe the club offers a distraction on the one hand so you don't notice the huge sign that the other is holding that says "FAILURE".