brummie

As an outsider, I love that old badge on the white shirt. In my mind, I associate it with other cool badges of the time, inc the Leeds one and the Forest one, only I've just googled it and was surprised that one is from the mid 80s, i was positive it was a 70s thing. Anyway, bring that one back.

Hmmm. More suggestion we might be leaving or rebuilding Villa Park. First, selling a chunk of us to Comcast (who own Sky and NBC and also do stadium builds) so they can be our ‘infrastructure partners’ and today some more appointments as directors, including the person at co-owner Wes Eden’s’ company who oversaw building a new stadium for the Bucks. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence. i don’t think any of this would be on the menu were it not for football becoming even more of a rapacious money driven industry than it already was.

Kidding nobody. Let me know when you want to come down for a match, I’ll make your dreams come true toony

The thing that is impressive with Emery is the total shit show of Gerrard that he took over. He took us from 17th (and only not 18th on goal difference) and with a squad that was totally demoralised by Gerrard’s mind games after a third of the season and got us into Europe having added only one player in the January window. He’s been amazing, but I think the circumstances he took over in gets forgotten by the media, mostly because they can’t accommodate the evidence that their hero Stevie G was a total fucking fraud. One other thing worth memtioning that doesn’t get highlighted much in the media - they also changed the entire football management side of things - Monchi on transfers (another proven winner) and Vidagamy as Emery’s right hand man, they’re the triangle of power basically, it’s not all about the manager. They also binned Christian Purslow, who I thought largely did a good job, but made the fatal error of pushing hard for Gerrard when Sawiris and Edens (the owners) were apparently far from convinced.

Arsenal aren’t all that. We didn’t even have our best player on the pitch.

ha ha yes thanks very much for that, chaps. ‘Angeball’ ha ha.

I was at that match, it was the 1982 European Super Cup (which we won, those were the days) final, the home leg. Gordon Cowans scored a penalty and one of the Barca players literally followed up on him and kicked him in the air and into the net. Genuinely the sort of thing that these days would get you a massive ban and probably a criminal investigation. It's on youtube, worth a look just to see how fucking insane it is. People get all starry eyed about tikky takky football purist Barcelona but forget they were fucking animals for decades. re the original point, I used to support all English sides in Europe too. Tony Parks in that 1984 (?) UEFA Cup final for Spurs, Forest in their European Cup finals, I always wanted the English team to win. It's totally the opposite now though - except, topically, for right now with this 5th place / coefficient thing going on which has forced me to want horrible things to happen.

14% possession for West Ham so far. #moyesball

Am I missing something, and I have no particular interest in this subject (well, a passing one, I guess) but how come 'footy headlines' are getting treated as having some sort of legitimacy on anything? Aren't they one of these 'two teenagers in dad's spare bedroom' operations?

Not sure i had entirely realised how incredibly dirty Brentford are until today. It's relentless.

He's a great player though. Southgate doesn't half have some talent available to him.

That's a bit harsh. Although I just watched his post match interview and he looked edgy as fuck. He looked like i do when my Mrs looks over my shoulder at my internet banking and notices something I'd rather she didn't see. Yeahbutnobutit'slikenothingit'ssortofyeahbutyeah *wobble*

We are so weak in that line up but now Olsen is in goal, that’s it. every shot on target = goal. I’m not watching it now.

He’s not even a footballer really, just an athlete. When he played for us, he was genuinely terrible even alongside one of the worst selections of footballers ever to play for us.

It's the little things about the 'big six' entrenchment that piss me off these days. After tha Man City - Arsenal boreathon, Neville and Richards were saying they've never seen a team limit City as much as Arsenal did. We had 22 shots against them at our place, they had 2, and both of those were in the same 'action', and we actually beat them. Now, I don't really care about this massively, it's not exactly going to change anyone's life, but it does show that these people are just so entrenched in thinking it's all about 'big six'.