WE STILL HAVE A SHOT AT 2ND PLACE!!!

Alright lads. After the QPR and Bolton fiasco's I must admit that I was so disgusted and disillusioned with what went on that I just shut off from football and haven't really read any forums, listened to BBC WM, read Villa twitter posts etc, I just needed a break from everything. Hell, even as I type this post I'm still not fully back into the "villa zone" so to speak. That will probably come by Thursday as the Hull game gets closer. What I have done though is take a little peek at Cardiff's fixtures, and I think their game at Derby being called off may have been an intervention from the heavens above. Firstly because Derby were in dire shape with injuries, and secondly because it stopped them from going ten points ahead of us which for me would have been psychologically damaging to the Villa team.

Now, here are their fixtures.

Burton at home
Sheffield Utd away
Wolves at home
Villa away
Norwich away
Forest at home
Derby away
Hull away
Reading at home


And here is our fixtures

Hull away
Reading at home
Norwich away
Cardiff at home
Leeds at home
Ipswich away
Derby at home
Millwall away

Now the likelihood is we're gonna be under tremendous pressure by the time we play Hull as I'm sure most would expect Cardiff to beat Burton so we could very well be ten points behind by the time we play Hull. IMO the situation is clear to see, we MUST win next three games. IF we do then there is a massive chance that a seven-point gap could be reduced to at worst five, at best it could be down to one If we win all three and they lose to Sheff U and Wolves. Now, let's be conservative and say the gap is four points as they head to VP, wouldn't we all take that right now? I'd snatch it with both hands and let the chips fall where they may when we come face to face with them on our own turf.

Another thing that could work In our favor is Cardiff's game with Derby. They play Forest at home on April 21st, Derby away on April 24th and then Hull away on April 28th. So that's THREE games in seven days down the stretch. Not only should that wear on them physically, but the great thing is Derby are doing the same thing and we will be playing them after they face Cardiff. So while they could potentially help to derail Cardiff In midweek, we could reap the benefits four days later when they rock up at VP with miles in their legs whilst we will have had the whole week off.

The whole thing looks bleak and If I was a Cardiff fan I'd be feeling like my team is already "home", but as we saw first-hand the other day, this game can bite you In the arse when you least expect it. The very minimum we must do is win the next three games. IF we do and even If Cardiff win their next three and are still seven ahead by the time we face them, us having a shot at reducing it down to four points should be the target right now, because even though they would still have a game in hand, it just may dent their confidence ahead of that three-game stretch they have In a week.

P.S. And I know Fulham are In the way as well, but that's only via a one goal advantage, so the difference is the same really.

COME ON VILLA!!!

There's certainly scope for Cardiff to lose games between now and the end of the season, it's just a question as to whether we can win enough games ourselves to capitalize. First things first, we need to beat Hull to keep the gap between us and second place to seven points, and then try and reduce it before we play them. Of course it would be nice if Burton could cause an upset, giving us a chance to reduce the gap sooner.

Never ever give up, cos you never know what is round the corner, when we won the Division one championship in 81 I thought we had blown it especially when we were loosing on the last day BUT Ipswich bottled it and the rest is history, UTV.

Can't say I have much faith in us beating Hull to be honest, and if we fail to beat them that would complete a diabolical trilogy of results for us. But if we can somehow get some confidence back with a win, then there might just be a glimmer of hope, with Kodjia returning as well.

We can't give up though, as I say if Cardiff were to have a bad end to the season and we didn't capitalize because we'd already settled for the play-offs, then we'd be kicking ourselves.

deadbuzzardalive wrote:Can't say I have much faith in us beating Hull to be honest, and if we fail to beat them that would complete a diabolical trilogy of results for us. But if we can somehow get some confidence back with a win, then there might just be a glimmer of hope, with Kodjia returning as well.

We can't give up though, as I say if Cardiff were to have a bad end to the season and we didn't capitalize because we'd already settled for the play-offs, then we'd be kicking ourselves.

The least we must do is match Cardiff's results until we meet them at VP. Because tbh If we do, I'm fully confident that we can beat them at home. The team seems to have a problem after huge games. We beat Blues and then lost to Fulham and just about got a draw against Preston. Then we batter Wolves and we've seen the last two results. They got through a massive high and then have a big slump. The thing that should give us confidence though is they've won most of the major games they've played lately which would set us up nicely IF we do have to go through the playoffs.

As for Kodjia!!..well that's massive, isn't it? Hogan and Grabban have done well no doubt, but put king Koj infront of Grealish, Adomah and Snoddy and I think it could be devastating. And he will lift the whole place just when we need him.

Sadly it's actually Fulham who we are forgetting. 13 wins and 4 draws from last 17 games? That's ridiculous quite frankly and they have much easier fixtures left than us or Cardiff so i see very little likelihood they will drop many points if any actually. So even if, & thats a huge if, Cardiff do drop enough points for us to be in with a shout, it will surely be Fulham who capitalize not us. Can you really see Cardiff not winning about 5 of their last 8 games coz i can't and that is realistically what would need to happen if we were to even have a slim chance. That would allow us to maybe draw a couple but i think we are now in cuckoo land sadly.

Sure we have a chance. Pressure does strange things to teams - and any match or training sessions has the prospect to throw up an injury or two.
Got to be honest though - I don't see us (or anyone) taking much out of cardiff - Warnock has them organised and strong. Fulham are one one heck of a run - but feel they are more likley to flounder.
The trick to these runs though is beating all the shite teams - we have massivley shot ourselves in the foot with the last 2 results - I think we have to win every game to get 2nd.

I said at the start of the season - we would have problems at both ends of the pitch - not quite in the way I expected but thats where we have fallen down. Sam Johnstone doesn't seems to have the top drawer saves in his locker to earn his points when the defence has an off day.

Up front a variety of people have come in carried the torch for a few games - however none of the forwards have been able to maintain scoring form over a sustained period of time.

A flurry of goals from Kjodia now seems our best hope for this season.

If we don't go up we need better options than Johnstone and Hogan next season.

Luckily we won't have Johnstone next year and will be looking to off load lots of over paid individuals to reduce costs! So unless Dr Xia has some clever way of generating revenue we need a desperate change of policy in trying to buy our way out of this league! Bruce cannot handle this change as he has only ever got previously relegated teams up that contain a whole bunch of ex-prem players! The man is a fraud and a charlatan and he needs to go!

Even now I find myself looking at the situation and thinking if Cardiff lose today and we win tomorrow, that cuts the gap to six points with us still having to play them, and surely they're due a dip in form and we a rise in form.

Not sure why I do it to myself.

deadbuzzardalive wrote:Even now I find myself looking at the situation and thinking if Cardiff lose today and we win tomorrow, that cuts the gap to six points with us still having to play them, and surely they're due a dip in form and we a rise in form.

Not sure why I do it to myself.

You know the old saying mate "Its the hope that kills you"

deadbuzzardalive wrote:Even now I find myself looking at the situation and thinking if Cardiff lose today and we win tomorrow, that cuts the gap to six points with us still having to play them, and surely they're due a dip in form and we a rise in form.

Not sure why I do it to myself.

The next three games will decide things for Cardiff. Today they play Sheff U away which could easily see them drop points. Then they've got Benfica Wanderers on Friday and after that they come to VP. Two defeats would certainly open the door again. But at the same time we've got to win our bloody games, otherwise all of this is futile.

There's also Fulham to think about, on the one hand we want them to lose games, but on the other hand if we're to contest the play-offs (which the way we're going isn't guaranteed) then we'd probably prefer to face Cardiff.

If we get the same number of points from the next three matches as we have the last three and Derby, Middlesborough and Bristol City win all of theirs we could well be outside the playoffs on GD. We're currently eight ahead of the three of them with Millwall and Sheffield United a further point behind. Fortunately Derby are having a terrible time of it and Boro and Bristol are looking as inconsistent as us. Fulham and Millwall are the only in-form teams which could be a worry for us if we do scrape into the playoffs. I'm not convinced in our current form we can beat anyone but the club brought in Bruce because he's a promotion specialist and despite the fact he's mostly not looked like he knows what he's doing and we appear to have arrived here by luck/chance/injuries to his favourite useless players and having the most expensive team I'm sure he'll put all of his years of experience into pulling the team together to win all the rest of the games this season.

Yeah I think it's play offs for us and I'd like to avoid Fulham in the semis and I'm sure if we got through at least it's do or die over one game at Wembley  (I'm making massive assumptions here like Cardiff finish second Fulham 3rd us 4th or 5th in order for this to materialise.
Honestly though, if we did manage to go up (and I honestly never used to be this negative) at best I'd see us clinging on to prem survival and at worst coming back down with enough parachute money to build a proper foundation with a progressive manager.
Worst case scenario for me is failing to go up and retaining Bruce as every day he's at the helm is a day of possible progress lost. All that bollocks he keeps churning out in the pressers must be seen by the players. Everyone has loads of games in a short time, but I don't hear the wolves Cardiff or Sunderland managers bleating on. He's a fecking defeatist from the off, no wonder we struggle.
Worse still he's turning me into One!

Brucies Villa i liken to a huge, once great ship. One which has been badly captained however and has occasionally bashed into some rocks with loads of little leaks & repairs on it's hull. The Captain has used anything he can lay his hands on to patch up the leaks with some repairs working well and some coming apart very quickly. The ship is attempting to race other smaller ships which are captained by men who know the way and how to navigate through the dangerous areas a lot more efficiently with far less bumps and leaks.. Despite the Villa ship being by far the more glamorous in the race it's poor brinkmanship and size it's proving a huge disadvantage in the home stretch.

The Utterer wrote:Brucies Villa i liken to a huge, once great ship. One which has been badly captained however and has occasionally bashed into some rocks with loads of little leaks & repairs on it's hull. The Captain has used anything he can lay his hands on to patch up the leaks with some repairs working well and some coming apart very quickly. The ship is attempting to race other smaller ships which are captained by men who know the way and how to navigate through the dangerous areas a lot more efficiently with far less bumps and leaks.. Despite the Villa ship being by far the more glamorous in the race it's poor brinkmanship and size it's proving a huge disadvantage in the home stretch.

At the start of the season Bruce was blaming the players for not doing what he wanted them to do. He recently said that he'd had final say on all the players coming in, which means he is responsible for bringing in Hogan and playing him as collector of scraps, approximate target of hoof, chaser down of goalie and runner into space for no arrival of ball. For us to score four (I think it was) goals from strikers in the first half of the season is laughable. Adomah's goals are all that's kept us from mid-table obscurity again. Bruce stuck with Whelan and Onomah when they were quite clearly the wrong players. He's recently taken to putting on all our fit strikers as subs, didn't we have four on the pitch a couple of matches ago in a desperate attempt to somehow score a goal. He did it in the last match too. When we do end up with two strikers up front the wingers still cut in to try to score, crosses only come in from the full backs. We don't seem to have enough pace, we counter attack to a certain point and then stop to wait for players to catch up, our sole striker is constantly isolated (see Grabban against Hull), I could go on and on and on and on and on and...

Bruce has a lot of expensive players playing as individuals, with the occasional Grealish performance glueing them all together. I want us to go up but I don't because we're not ready for the PL. Wolves are going to hit the PL running - even Cardiff and Fulham will take confidence with them. Next season wherever we are we'll be missing Snodgrass and Tuanzebe (needs work but there's a great player in there), Grabban, possibly Terry and Johnstone and definitely Onomah (not a miss!). Jedi and Whelan will be another year slower, Elmo came in for his crosses and linkup play with Snodgrass, Adomah appears to have gone off the boil completely, Hogan can't score goals under Bruce, Kodjia's been out for a year... I could go on. Unless Xia has a huge pot of money to throw at the PL we won't last long. If we do go up that pot will likely go to Bruce. If not we're back to square one again, with a new manager coming in to play a new way and make half the players redundant, like it's been since MON left.

Incidentally who is seeing Villa's PL demise in Southampton? Sell all your players, change manager every year (admittedly their managers tend to get poached!) and run out of extremely talented academy players. Their academy is in seventh in the U23 league, five places and 12 points behind us (in second, with a game in hand over Saints and four points behind leaders Blackburn).

Once again agree with @FoxyAV. I've been strangely enjoying the old fashioned nonsense of the Championship but PL is always the aim & I'm not sure I want to go up in the state we're in at the moment (particularly looking at us during this 3-game slump). I'm suspicious of the "let's just get up & sort it all out when we get there" approach. The one thing about going down is that you have the chance to clear the decks a bit, get your house in order & rebuild, often properly utilising the academy - then you have an advantage against those clubs in the PL who have spent the previous season patching up holes, trying to avoid the drop (as we used to).

I'd rather be counting games & points in the upper six of the Championship than the lower six on the PL - it's a better win ratio.

We'll be lucky to be anywhere near the top six of the championship next season, all our best players will leave, and we won't be able to afford Premier league quality loans, and I have no faith in Wyness and Round to bring in the kind of manager who can get us competing on a very tight budget. If we go up and come back down, at least we'll have the premier league money, and the club will be in a much better state financially to re-build. Plus I want to learn more about Xia's other plans for the club, which presumably can't really happen until we're in the top flight.

Forget the top 2, it’s not happening, it’s gone. All hopes rest on the playoffs now. I’ve said previously that should we not make it up this season then we will be up shit creek with no paddles whatsoever, we’ll be forced to trim the fat in terms of playing staff. We’ll also be forced to source an actual proper manager/coach that can bring some fluidity and thought to the club, as we should have done some 18-24months ago. A manager that doesn’t kill the enthusiasm or effectiveness of all your strikers would be a decent starting point. In the event of actually somehow gaining promotion we will still be best served sourcing a new manager. We’d have to spend as little as possible whilst giving ourselves a chance to finish outside of the bottom 3, trousering a season or twos premier money will keep us financially secure for the foreseeable. We’re simply nowhere near ready/good enough to expect anything other than bottom 5 of the premiership, we’ve mostly wasted our time outside of the spotlight when we should have been becoming a leaner, smarter football team.

Picked this up from a Reading forum i was having a look at:

As accurate as any readily available contract information. Ultimately no one really knows apart from the parties involved but I wouldn’t doubt it. If anything I’m surprised they aren’t higher, I know they’re paying Kodjia a shit tonne too but don’t know figures.

Apparently;

Robert Snodgrass - 42k (Villa pay 70% of his 60k West Ham salary)
Mile Jedinak - 45k
Micah Richards - 50k
Gabby Agbonlahor - 54k
John Terry - 60k

Richards (who’s only made 2 league appearances in the last 2 years - both last season) will have cost villa £10m in wages when his contract expires. Appearing 24 times in the prem the season they were relegated it works out at £384,615 per league appearance (assuming he doesn’t play again for them

No wonder teams love to beat us.....

If we can keep a few key players like Chester, Kodjia, Hourihane, Lansbury, Adomah and Grealish we should be ok in the Championship. If Bruce is manager I would imagine we'll be lucky to hit 13th or 14th or wherever we finished last season.

What a complete shower Richards and Lescott were, especially when Clark and Okore had looked pretty solid at the end of the previous season. I honestly have no idea why we bought him. We didn't need a RB and someone decided we should pay a huge amount of money to try him at CB and then pair him with a CB West Brom didn't want. What a great idea that was. Especially when we just stuck with them even though it wasn't working.

When did we turn into a retirement home for previously good players? Was it in the Lambert years when someone decided we needed some experience? I honestly don't know if Terry has been worth breaking up the Chester/Baker partnership that did so well last year and taking the captaincy away from Chester. Baker's balls are bigger than Terry's too, although at his age I wouldn't be going in for some of the tackles Baker does either*.

Out of that list I'd only keep Snoddy and I bet he's going straight back to West Ham at the end of the season whether he likes it or not.

*my apologies for bringing Terry's and Baker's balls and tackles into this but Bruce is a big fan of both.

I wouldn't hold out much hope of us keeping any of Chester, Grealish or even Kodjia, despite his injuries, they'll probably have a choice of either staying here on reduced wages, or playing at an higher level and earning more money; I wouldn't be surprised to see teams come in for the likes of Hourihane, Adomah, and Green as well.

If we're in this league next season, I expect our team to be made up primarily of our youngsters, like Davis, and maybe some youngsters on loan from Premier teams who won't command big wages. Experience will probably come from the likes of Whelan, Elmohamady and Jedkinak, as I'm not sure if anyone will take them off our hands, which is probably why we'll end up having to sell some of the other players we'd rather not, to help balance the books.

On Snodgrass, his brother apparently said that he likes it so much here, that he might stay whatever division we're in, but again, he might not have much choice, if we can't afford his wages, or West Ham want to sell him.

Whatever division we're in there's going to be a big rebuild needed, but at least if we go up, we'll have the finances to make it happen.

Why don't we wait to see what happens first before forecasting pure "doom and gloom" for the club? FFS guys chill out. I believe we'll still have Adomah, Hourihane, Grealish, Hogan, Green etc even If we don't go up. And imo that's a good base to build from. Plus we'll still have some loan guys like Gollini and Gill to come back too who could potentially replace Johnson and Snody.

I've seen Gil's return being debated on Villatalk, but people seem to have missed that when he left on loan in the summer, Xia said that Deportivio are obliged to buy him permanently when the loan ends, it's just been worked out that way because it helps with FFP, so I doubt very much we'll be seeing him again. We had a similar deal in place with Amavi and Marseille but for some reason that deal was made permanent early.

AstonThriller wrote:Why don't we wait to see what happens first before forecasting pure "doom and gloom" for the club? FFS guys chill out.

Because we've got form mate. This club has wrestled doom and gloom from the jaws of optimism far too often for me to start broadcasting rose petals at the feet of potato head and singing kumbaya round the campfire of hope.