Pre-season friendlies 2017

Walsall match on YouTube tonight at 7:30.

LOL where have we heard this before?

Neil Moxley‏

Believe SB fielding strong #avfc team tonight amid general unhappiness at Shrewsbury performance. Manager not happy bunny. At. All.

SMH but yet it them sort of performances keep happening time and time again!!. Will be interesting to see what he comes up with tonight. Want to see this side...

....................Johnstone...................

....Bree......Chester...Terry.....Amavi........

..............Veretout...Lansbury.........
.....................Hourihane.................
.............Thor.................Green...
.......................Hogan..........................

Time to switch back to 433 and stop messing around now.

Johnstone, Bree, Samba, Terry ©, Taylor, Lansbury, Hourihane, Bjarnason, Amavi, Green, Agbonlahor.

Bunn, Chester, Hutton, Richards, Lyden, Veretout, Hogan.

Interestingly no McCormack, unless Davis is injured I think he can count himself unlucky, he's been one our better players from what I've seen.

Yeah, Ross has been linked with Sunderland hasn't he? Would be great if we could get 8-10m for him and get him off the books. The bloke just doesn't look like he'll cut it here. As for the team SB picked tonight...meh.

Got to feel sorry for the poor bastard and his missus who are stopping in the hotel next door on their way somewhere and have spent the last hour surrounded by football fans whilst having dinner!

They just asked me which teams are playing tonight

Honestly and I can't believe I'm saying this pre season but i really hope Bruce's tenure is a short one. Just nothing the bloke does ever excites me, everything is a lumbering painful grind. We talk about his brand of football. I'll tell you what his brand is; think about the club's he's managed and how they played. I'll tell you what the brand is, it's the brand I'd never have bothered to switch the tv on to watch. It's bad enough now as a Villa fan having to watch us, imagine being a neutral and enduring our turgid displays of last season.
I hope I'm proved wrong and I'd love to have to eat my words, but I just can't see any entertainment or freedom of expression under Bruce.
Christ, I'm usually like this by crimbo, I haven't even been on my summer hols yet and I'm depressed!
Let's hope it's 6-0 to us tonight and I can eat them words!

I'm slowly starting to agree. I still think Bruce should be given next season. We've made our bed now so to speak, but the football is awful.

Where is the movement? We don't look like a football team at all, nevermind a professional one. Absolutely no movement at all. All static and crosses.

Sunderland fans said Bruce was good at signing shit average joes and filling the squad up with 500 signings. Bjarnason will be one of those. Such a bad player.

Our first 11 is pretty good on paper tbh. It's a travesty we can't do better on the pitch than this.

It's a slight improvement on Saturday, but Walsall still look the more comfortable in possesion and have created the better chances. As per usual we don't really look like we know what we're doing or what the plan is; nothing I've seen suggests that we will be any better than a midtable side next season.

Its rubbish. Nothing has changed or looks like changing at all, it's Groundhog Day.

It's a shame as well Joppe cos I was hoping great things from Bjarnasson - I thought he might be our "sleeper" signing, but he's got no conviction in front of goal - what was that, 4/5 decent areas of the field to score from and only 1 tame effort on goal from him?
Terry is a wonderful signing though - he's already showing what he brings.
Do you know what, unless I missed a passage of play, in that first half we didn't manage to string 6 passes together - not even 6 ffs.
I was thinking it looks like a side made up of defenders and midfielders, but I suppose apart from Gabby (who's done ok actually) if we haven't got Hogan/Mac/Kodj/RH-M on the pitch (regardless of their performances last season), we're not going to look like an all out attacking side are we?
Not been that impressed with Lansbury, Hourihane or Bree. Samba looks slow, Green is our best player going forward, Amavi looks like he's in 3rd gear, Taylor's done ok.
What can friendlies ever tell us about the season? Probably not much, but even so, I'd like to see more passes strung together, and a bit more guile and finishing in the last third, backed up with some attacking midfield play.

Samba and Terry look pretty good, but it's shite opposition tbf.

Being outplayed by the mighty Walsall at present.....

Not very inspiring but some nice inter plays with no end result, lets just tick off another pre season game and move on.

I've got to get something off my chest here.

How on earth can we be so bad at passing, set pieces and crossing? Just HOW? I swear to McGrath I'm a better passer of the ball than anyone in this Villa side, which is impressing as nobody have never paid me to play football. It's just fucking astounding how bad they are. When Lansbury overhit that corner I nearly lost my shit. It's fucking unreal. I can't believe it.

Secondly, why are our wingers allergic to beating a man? They + Gabby run up, get scared, turn around pass backwards. EVERY TIME. Fucking hell, this club is killing my mental wellbeing.

Well that's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back.
I can take meaningless as preseason friendlies are just that, but what pisses me off is aimless, and I think that's what we are.
Samba and Terry were the stand out players.
Seen nothing tonight to convince me that we will show the massive improvement we need to see over last season. Feels like more of the same, just no cutting edge.
Hope the mini tournament in Germany sees us improve.

Joppe84 wrote:I've got to get something off my chest here.

How on earth can we be so bad at passing, set pieces and crossing? Just HOW? I swear to McGrath  I'm a better passer of the ball than anyone in this Villa side, which is impressing as nobody have never paid me to play football. It's just fucking astounding how bad they are. When Lansbury overhit that corner I nearly lost my shit. It's fucking unreal. I can't believe it.

Secondly, why are our wingers allergic to beating a man? They + Gabby run up, get scared, turn around pass backwards. EVERY TIME. Fucking hell, this club is killing my mental wellbeing.

I was just thinking the same - how can Amavi be so bad at passing?

And why do we think the long ball lumped over the top is a worthwhile tactic? I tell you why, cos it's a 50/50 ball, and our short passing game is so fucking tragic, that's only a 50/50 ball as well, so it's no disadvantage to lump it.

Green was shite. Gabby doesn't understand how to play football. Lansbury way too deep.

Terry and Samba look more than decent. Hogan made some smart moves which no one picked up.

Right, gonna stop posting tonight as we've not kicked an EFL ball in anger yet and I've moaned more on one thread so far than all of last season put together!

I'm sure we'll be fine, we will, won't we................?

Well that wasn't fun to watch ugh!

I thought Bjarnasson looked like Craig Gardner mk 11 but without the ability to shoot.

Hourihane and Lansbury huffed and puffed, and huffed and puffed but where on Earth is the creativity?

Gabby was ineffective and zero threat,

Hogan was not on long.....Thanks goodness.

Green tried but his control and distribution was awful and he kept giving away possession.

Terry, Samba, Taylor i thought looked decent, Bree was average. Johnson had little to do.

But why is it even Walsall look brighter when attacking than we do? We look totally clueless and it's shockingly bad to watch, depressing actually.

Pre season game or not that was exactly the kind of football we suffered last season, nothing has changed. I wish i could say that Bruce just doesn't know how to change things, but the fact is he doesn't want to change things. Bruce has always set his sides up this way and i don't see him changing now. So if he stays this is what we have to look forward to. I only hope Xia pulls the trigger sooner rather than later or we can kiss another season goodbye.

De Kuip wrote:Right, gonna stop posting tonight as we've not kicked an EFL ball in anger yet and I've moaned more on one thread so far than all of last season put together!

I'm sure we'll be fine, we will, won't we................?

HOPEFULLY

If this carries on into the season the club have to act swiftly otherwise it will be another wasted season. Trouble is I'm worried about those running the club at the moment, and am not sure that I trust them to replace him with the right guy; think Moyes, Allardyce or Pearson and you're probably not far away from the next Villa manager, Moyes the most likely, as those at the club seem to like giving jobs to people they already know.

I'm still not sure what I watched earlier. There are some plus sides though: it was free and I had cold beer. And made myself some bloody good kebabs to eat while I watched, er, whatever it was. A nice friendly kick around? Some kind of benefit for Walsall FC's pie shop?

I too thought Terry and Samba looked good and it says a lot, doesn't it, that no one else stood out bar the defence? I suppose we've also established that Amavi doesn't work in the front line of a 4-3-3 (although it felt more like a 4-5-1), and Bjarnason isn't much good. Oh and after two seasons where Gabby scored a grand total of two goals, it transpires he had, what, no shots on goal in 70 or so minutes? Sure, bring him on after 70 minutes to bully the opposition but he's not really much good for anything else.

On the other hand we were missing a couple of our most creative players in Adomah and Grealish, and it really underlines just how good Kodjia is that his goals kept us in the Championship last season.

Where is RHM?