Sunderland V Aston Villa: Saturday 2nd January at 3PM

villabromsgrove wrote:I going to log out and read the reviews and listen to the interviews before I say anything else.

I'm not really sure what to say either. I'm very stoical about it, I think. Crap football team loses another game isn't really a surprise and there's only so many times you can re-hash the same old comments watching games that resemble groundhog day. I had a brief flicker of hope when Traore came on and set up that goal for Gil but after that it went back to being hopeless. So meh.

Gone from fist-pumping while driving the car through Dudley on hearing Gil's equaliser to utter, crushing disappointment now.

GadgetMan wrote:Safe to say now guys we are down. Without even a fight really. Disgraceful from top to bottom. Truly gutted. Lerner you have destroyed this once great club and Fox, your comments yesterday stating "We're building something special" couldn't of been worse timed. You make a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. What exactly is special about what we're doing here? Maybe going for the fewest wins ever or the lowest points total is 'special' You're our very own David Brent. Sadly though you're real and not at all funny.

One of the first out the door come may, we can't afford your 1 million a year salary in the Championship. Lerner you're a disgrace, you've abandoned this club for so long that we fell too far behind and now we see the results of your actions. F**k you!!

I'm completely gutted as today is the first time I've truly believed it's all over and we're down. You've been a terrible terrible custodian of OUR club Lerner, please please sell and GO.

We may be down, but we'll come back and fight another day. Once these clowns have all disappeared, we'll be a proper club again, one that actually competes.

Sigh........

Spot on, GM. The limp performances may have stopped me getting angry but the thought of Lerner and Fox keeps me raging. What a pair of tossers.

I said a few years ago under Lambert. You keep buying championship quality and paying championship wages, that's where you'll end up.

It's not rocket science, Lerner has been negligent and I hope it costs him big time. The best thing he can do for us now is to ensure he sells it for a fair price and to the RIGHT person/people and FAST.

I'll leave it there for now, I'm too mad.

I'm back after reading a few reviews and getting a bit of uplifting online retail therapy via ebay. I can't just blame our comical defence, because we only had three shots on target. Two of them were crackers but that is nowhere near enough to win a match when you have a titanically leaky defence.

We're going down, I'll accept that now.

It's just the fact that I'm having to watch a bunch of players who have also accepted relegation five months before the end of the season.

It's good to see that Remi has his priorities in order. He refused to shake Big Sam's hand because Allardyce forgot to welcome him before the match. That's the spirit Remi. Deal with the really important things like a breach of etiquette, and forget about all the sh*t that your team are playing, while wearing the famous claret and blue.

I really don't 'get' Garde.

Sandie wrote:I really don't 'get' Garde.

I think he's a nice guy who has been appointed to a job that is too big and far too alien for him. If he had been able to come in with the two Lyon coaches things may have been different, we'll never know. Then again with our dysfunctional squad things would probably have turned out much the same.

I think that's part of the problem at the club. We genuinely need people with more of an edge, a bit more nastiness.

The whole mentality of the club just stinks. 'Oh it's okay if you don't win another game this season, you can still be manager next season' 'We don't need to beat Sunderland, we will have other chances' 'It doesn't matter if you have fuck all discipline and concentrate more on having a go at pundits than defending opposition attacks you can still be starting centre half and captain'. With that in mind, maybe we start to see why we're going to finish last. Sub-par effort and acheivement is acceptable at Lerner's Aston Villa. Players like Gabby (who Garde seems to have caught on to unless we give him too much credit) and Grealish hang around and take the piss because they can get away with it. And don't get me started on the CEO or owner...

There's no urgency, no hardness and we're fucked beyond belief because of it. Some of the people are just too soft, others are just outright incompetent...

I don't blame the manager but he and his attitude are a symptom of what's gone wrong.

Desparate fans on the one side .... Complacent Owner,and overpaid management and players on the other.

It's been a sad fact of a Villa fan's life for the past six years.

I think Garde is potentially the right man (time will tell, but I see what he's trying to do, a la Houllier, rebuild the club and get rid of the deadwood) at the wrong time (sadly a rebuilding job was for last summer or the next one had we stayed up, we needed someone to come in and make an immediate impact, who though?)

There's an acceptance that Remi Garde will be manager next season come what may why? If he fails to win between now and the end of the season and the reason the board got rid of Sherwood was because 'results weren't good enough and he wasn't getting the best out of the players available' then what is different with Garde?

If we finish bottom and have shown no signs of progress at all, then I'd say he has failed. If we finish bottom, but come the end of the season, people like Gabby have been shifted and we can see a style of play, a plan, progress on and off the pitch, then maybe it's the tough pill we have to swallow and give Garde time to rebuild the club. I'd be ok with that.

I'm absolutely not ok with Fox, Reilly, Henrik still hanging around VP picking up way too much cash for doing very little. I want them out of my club. Especially the weasel that is Fox, never liked him from day one. Speaks like we're all stupid and is a patronising, disingenuous arse. Another huge error by Lerner, paying him all that cash and putting ALL his faith in him. Then we have the new Chairman trotting into town sometime this month, what's he going to say? According to Fox, we're building something really special...........Well Tom, my definition of special vastly differs from yours. Take your smarmy attitude and clueless moneyball approach and jog off back to Pepsi or Nike or wherever you were before you joined a football club as you knock nothing about the EPL and running a FOOTBALL CLUB, yes that's right, we're a Football Club, not JUST a business. "Hey we may be going down, but we've improved commercially" tell that to all our fans when we're away to Huddersfield next year and we can't attract any big corporate partners. D**khead.

Rant over and in the wrong thread. I'm not a fan of Fox as you can tell and as for Lerner, he's probably none the wiser and doesn't realise relegation exists. I'm sure mummy won't be happy when half the value of the club is wiped off come May.....

I'll really stop now!!!

Right I'm determined not to sulk .... Villabromsgrove Towers is starting an evening of Karaoke, with Jager Bombs all round.

Up the Villa .... right up!

GadgetMan wrote:I think Garde is potentially the right man (time will tell, but I see what he's trying to do, a la Houllier, rebuild the club and get rid of the deadwood) at the wrong time (sadly a rebuilding job was for last summer or the next one had we stayed up, we needed someone to come in and make an immediate impact, who though?)

There's an acceptance that Remi Garde will be manager next season come what may why? If he fails to win between now and the end of the season and the reason the board got rid of Sherwood was because 'results weren't good enough and he wasn't getting the best out of the players available' then what is different with Garde?

If we finish bottom and have shown no signs of progress at all, then I'd say he has failed. If we finish bottom, but come the end of the season, people like Gabby have been shifted and we can see a style of play, a plan, progress on and off the pitch, then maybe it's the tough pill we have to swallow and give Garde time to rebuild the club. I'd be ok with that.

I'm absolutely not ok with Fox, Reilly, Henrik still hanging around VP picking up way too much cash for doing very little. I want them out of my club. Especially the weasel that is Fox, never liked him from day one. Speaks like we're all stupid and is a patronising, disingenuous arse. Another huge error by Lerner, paying him all that cash and putting ALL his faith in him. Then we have the new Chairman trotting into town sometime this month, what's he going to say? According to Fox, we're building something really special...........Well Tom, my definition of special vastly differs from yours. Take your smarmy attitude and clueless moneyball approach and jog off back to Pepsi or Nike or wherever you were before you joined a football club as you knock nothing about the EPL and running a FOOTBALL CLUB, yes that's right, we're a Football Club, not JUST a business. "Hey we may be going down, but we've improved commercially" tell that to all our fans when we're away to Huddersfield next year and we can't attract any big corporate partners. D**khead.

Rant over and in the wrong thread. I'm not a fan of Fox as you can tell and as for Lerner, he's probably none the wiser and doesn't realise relegation exists. I'm sure mummy won't be happy when half the value of the club is wiped off come May.....

I'll really stop now!!!

Good rant GM .... love it.

GadgetMan wrote:I think Garde is potentially the right man (time will tell, but I see what he's trying to do, a la Houllier, rebuild the club and get rid of the deadwood) at the wrong time (sadly a rebuilding job was for last summer or the next one had we stayed up, we needed someone to come in and make an immediate impact, who though?)

There's an acceptance that Remi Garde will be manager next season come what may why? If he fails to win between now and the end of the season and the reason the board got rid of Sherwood was because 'results weren't good enough and he wasn't getting the best out of the players available' then what is different with Garde?

If we finish bottom and have shown no signs of progress at all, then I'd say he has failed. If we finish bottom, but come the end of the season, people like Gabby have been shifted and we can see a style of play, a plan, progress on and off the pitch, then maybe it's the tough pill we have to swallow and give Garde time to rebuild the club. I'd be ok with that.

Spot on. I'll be honest and say I've not seen it with Garde yet. He's improved us a little from Sherwood's time but Sherwood was so bad that was not difficult. I think my issue is that I'm not sure what Garde is. There's a part of me that thinks he's a product of this set up at the club which is rotten to the core. He's already came out and defended Lerner a bit and whilst I don't expect him to say 'my boss is a useless article' it doesn't sit right with me. If I was him I'd find a way to distance myself from them. As it is, I have an unshakable nagging doubt that the three of them (Lerner, Fox, Garde) are all clubbing together to protect themselves for some kind of self preservation. My low (subterranean) opinion of the other two means that this nagging idea does not reflect well on Garde.

I want to see a positive uplift in results, set out with a kind of plan. If we improve  but only with loan players who won't stick around for the Championship then I'll see through it as a manager trying to buy time. If we don't improve hugely then I start to wonder whether he's the right man to get us back up. However, as things stand I don't yet see Garde as the enemy and I think we're well past the point where sacking managers will keep us up.

As things stand things don't look good for him. He's got a 0% win ratio hanging round his neck and I'm not sure how likely things are to improve unless we get players in (and it will be difficult to attract them).

GadgetMan wrote:I'm absolutely not ok with Fox, Reilly, Henrik still hanging around VP picking up way too much cash for doing very little. I want them out of my club. Especially the weasel that is Fox, never liked him from day one. Speaks like we're all stupid and is a patronising, disingenuous arse. Another huge error by Lerner, paying him all that cash and putting ALL his faith in him. Then we have the new Chairman trotting into town sometime this month, what's he going to say? According to Fox, we're building something really special...........Well Tom, my definition of special vastly differs from yours. Take your smarmy attitude and clueless moneyball approach and jog off back to Pepsi or Nike or wherever you were before you joined a football club as you knock nothing about the EPL and running a FOOTBALL CLUB, yes that's right, we're a Football Club, not JUST a business. "Hey we may be going down, but we've improved commercially" tell that to all our fans when we're away to Huddersfield next year and we can't attract any big corporate partners. D**khead.

I really can't stand him either. He's full of more shit than the town sewer after National Balti Day. Indeed, I just put a post a few of his head scratching quotes in the CEO/Owner thread as I felt like having a vent. I start to get angry just thinking about him. But if we go down, he'll cling on and keep spinning. We can rest assured that our careful plans on how to cope with relegation will include him hanging on to his fat salary whilst any job losses will come much lower down the foodchain.

Spot on that Sandie, good post. I can't disagree with any of it. I hope you're wrong about Garde, but I see why you see it like that. Time will tell. I hope he has an inner steel and is telling them what's for in private. He is close friends with Houllier and I take heart in the fact that Houllier is a smart guy and so is Wegner and they both see something in him. As I said, just maybe not the fit we needed for the here and now.

As for Fox, spot on! that smarmy git will definitely ensure he clings on to his salary, come what may. The board of our club make me feel so bloody annoyed.

We're Aston Villa and why we have no divine right, it's some feat to take us and destroy us to this level. Well played Lerner, well played.

I think the level of rant on here tonight has been very fair to the unbelievably unprofessional people who have ruined our historically great club. It takes a special degree of idiocy to bring a big club to it's knees, and then throttle it when it's been brought low.