Sick of Sky 'Experts' trashing Villa!

[olaftab]

3 things:
1. Pundits said the same thing about Darren Bent  earlier this year after his transfer to us. I think even Capello mentioned it. That is how it is I am afraid.
2. There is this  kudos that hangs around if you  are in the squad of  a CL club. Ash Young for example can play crap for the next 5 years but he will always be first choice for England.
3. As  it has been mentioned above we don't need Sky and the Press to do us down. Current Manager and the Board plus the fans who have failed to turn up this season are doing it very well.

[olaftab]

Roll on AH giving him (SD) a good dumping over the sideline and then perhaps his confidence will diminish

I would have loved to have seen him mess about in front of Mark Delaney...peeling him off the advertising boards a few seconds later!

[JJ-AV]

5 ex Villa play last night, was it?

[eamonn]

Did Stan not try and stamp on Downing's foot like the last time he played against him? Pity.

[ozzjim]

I enjoyed watching Young, I have all season, playing like the top player he can be.

Downing has been anonymous for Livershite, anonymous for England and looks like he will take time to settle. That is the issue with Downing, if it takes him as long as it did us for him to turn it on, he will be dropped for England and benched at the bindippers before he realises.

[JJ-AV]

Rooney and Ashley have been fantastic together this season, for Club and country.

Wish we'd have kept him, if we'd have got top 4 in 2008/09 things might have been so different.

[Billy Walker]

Any idea where the hatred for Villa started

I don't think it's hatred, I think it's indifference.  When Villa aren't shaping up or pulling up trees they certainly forget about us pretty quickly.   When we are doing well and making progress it takes them an age to talk us up or take us seriously.  They are just indifferent to certain clubs and regions, in my view.

When did it start?  I would have a stab at the 1960's when the media started to get into football in a tabloid and televisual sense.  Leeds, West Ham, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man Utd, Tottenham, Liverpool, those are the clubs that seem to have been given an extra sheen by the media.  Maybe we were unlucky with that particular era (the 1960's) coinciding with the most catastrophic period in our history?  I don't know.  The main media focal points of England being London and the North West doesn't help our cause either.

[TopDeck113]

Good post, BW.  Indifference is the word.

There are certainly clubs that are favoured in their coverage, either because of the knowledge that their large supporter base will shift paper sales/TV subscription (Liverpool. Man Utd), London-based journalists own supporting habits (Spurs, West Ham) and the perpetuation of the myth that certain clubs have a history and mystique superior to others (all of the above, Arsenal, Newcastle).  There is another, transitory category, namely when a media-friendly, good for a quote manager is running your club.  'Arry and Venables are examples.  We had it when both Ron Atkinson and MON were in charge.

[Pete3206]

If we were doing well and had just made the kind of signings that the top clubs have made, the media would be all over us just as they were when we were lying 3rd and 4th during MON's 2nd season.

Mediocrity does not make good TV or interesting reading.

As for the pundits, some are good, most are ignorant of anything else going on outside of the 'big' clubs. Case in point was a caller on Talksport the other day, making Micky Quinn sound a complete prat because he couldn't get any facts right and knew nothing about the matter they were discussing which was teams in the lower leagues. Quinn just nervously went "eeeerm, eeeerm anyway about Li'pool, allight our kid, la" as usual. Pundits should know what they're on about, but invariably land jobs because they know somebody who knows somebody.

[Holtenderinthesky]

If you operate as a small club you deserve to be (and therefore will be) treated like one.  We sell our best players to clubs we'd like to think are our rivals but in reality they aren't, they are streets ahead.  What do we expect the media to say about us when the board have decided to make us a feeder club?

[Mister E]

You cannot say you are a big club when Stoke have bypassed you in the close season.

Do you really think so? Really?!
We'll see I guess, but don't think what they've done in the close season suggests they've overtaken us. They've added a few medium-level players to cope with the extra games they hope to play in the E League.

[Villanation]

There is a lot of sh1te spoken by and from these so called experts, most of which can't see the wood for the tree's, they live in this incubated world and truly truly believe that only football people can know about football, said this many times there are a million man managers out there working in normal life, experiencing all the hazards that normal life throws at you that given a 3 month crash course to get there UEFA badges would do twice the job than even the best football managers out there, would have a better analytical judgement than the best pundits out there, prove my point, anybody see how Paulo d'canio dealt with that player the other night and then bad mouthed him afterwards, that's a twat for you.

I rate these pundits judgements and comments on football about as realistic as someone commenting on the fact they ave just played Football Manager, and the team they picked won everything going so therefore would do the same in real life.

Stewart Downing, once the impact of his move wears of so will he and then Dalgliesh will stick him on the bench until he heads back to B'oro

Ashley Young will have a great 1st season at Man Utd and just as he did as Villa............fade......

Phucking Rooney, jez the man is a caricature of himself, a complete joke, they actually bothered to get his opinion after the game when just 12 months ago he walked of the pitch gobbing and abusing the England fans actually to the camera because the man simply has no brain, because when it comes to the crunch and England gets raped in the next big tournament, we'll all have to go through the same old tread mill of why England players don't perform and how they get paid to much and why does Rooney go missing in the big games and the same old we don't develop the youth and all the other crap rather than looking at the actual facts and that is players like Rooney allegedly our best are 2nd rate when it comes to it

We beat a pub team 3-0 ffs, actually that's being defamatory of pub teams because I've definitely seen better pub teams players playing on a Sunday morning then did put that Bulgaria kit on the other night being the so called professionals.

[Vanilla]

Didn't Heskey get dropped like a stone from the England squad when he left Liverpool, and Phil Neville when he left Manure. There is an assumption that once a player moves up the ladder, their international prowess improves, and vice versa.

Also, there is an over trumpeting of players from 'top teams' playing for England, simply because certain pundits only see these players play on a weekly basis. So they know their games inside out. For example, pundits would now know Young's attributes as he is now playing at a stadium they spend most of their time in.

[gervilla]

I wouldn't stress about it. There is a rag of a newspaper over here called "The Sunday World", its aimed at the dumber elements of Irish society with 4/5 pages of "Soccer " coverage. It's all Man U & Liverpool  because it's catering for the masses( 90 % of footie fans over here follow one of those)
It doesn't bother me, I just don't but the rag.
I don't expect us to get favourable coverage on Sky either, why should we ? It's not like we are challenging to win anything. Like it or not we are down there with Everton, Newcastle and other such pretty non entities at the moment with no European football and bobbing around trying to stay mid table and out of trouble. Last season was hairy enough for me,I'll take mid table obscurity and no worries of relegation for this season after all the upheaval and asset stripping of the last few months.
We are Aston Villa...not Barcelona and thankfully not Birmingham City.

[RunRickyRun]

Step 1 : Remove dish
Step 2 : Throw dish in bin
Step 3 : Live happily ever after