Negativity

[Clampy]

Personally I thought some of the comments on the post match thread on Saturday were way over the top. I know a lot of people tend to post straight after the game and a lot of it was frustration but when you see people talking about relegation battles after four games and giving Lambert till Christmas, you wonder what goes on in people's heads.

[Smirker]

Personally I thought some of the comments on the post match thread on Saturday were way over the top. I know a lot of people tend to post straight after the game and a lot of it was frustration but when you see people talking about relegation battles after four games and giving Lambert till Christmas, you wonder what goes on in people's heads.

It's comments like that I was referring to, really.

We may or may not be in a relegation battle this season but as has been pointed out numerous times, it's one bad result and a massive overreaction imho.

[MarkM]

Personally I thought some of the comments on the post match thread on Saturday were way over the top. I know a lot of people tend to post straight after the game and a lot of it was frustration but when you see people talking about relegation battles after four games and giving Lambert till Christmas, you wonder what goes on in people's heads.

It's comments like that I was referring to, really.

We may or may not be in a relegation battle this season but as has been pointed out numerous times, it's one bad result and a massive overreaction imho.

Its not just one bad result though is it, we hardly set the world alight last season.

Simply because we had a summer break you can't just forget last season [or the ones before] you have to ask are we seeing a repeating pattern of Lamberts Villa?

We were also awful against Liverpool for much of the game

I hope that it was just a poor performance but I honestly think we may struggle again this season, but I hope not

[Chico Hamilton III]

The Project....see the bigger picture...Work in Progress. We're football fans, not management consultants.We don't calmly evaluate situations, we react instantly. That's the way it always has been and always should be with football.

And although I've never done it myself ( Millwall last year being the only exception) I've no probem with fans booing a team off at full time. Better than doing it during the game and a perfect way of expressing your reaction to a shit performance. I'd like to think that a bit of booing from fans is the least of the players' worries - I'd imagine/hope that Lambert put the fear of God into them in the dressing room on Saturday evening.


 

[Smirker]

Its not just one bad result though is it, we hardly set the world alight last season.

But last season was last season and as it went on we got a lot better, he had just inherited a shit team from a shit manager, it takes time to rid the club of the deadwood and put his own stamp on the team.

Players have left, players have signed. This isn't the same team as last year. The home form is bad, don't get me wrong, but I trust we will improve on it.

If we had had the same manager for the past three seasons then I could understand some of the criticisms toward Lambert but not when he's barely been in the job 5 minutes.

Simply because we had a summer break you can't just forget last season [or the ones before] you have to ask are we seeing a repeating pattern of Lamberts Villa?

I'm not forgetting them but they are not relevant to now.

We were also awful against Liverpool for much of the game

I don't think we were. We started off slow, but awful?

[paul_e]

I agree with this, the mood on this site has flipped alarmingly quickly from generally very positive after 1 win in 3 to painfully negative after another defeat.  I think a lot of people expected a win and this has really shaken them but there needs to be some consideration of the positives that we'd been seeing previously that led to it being such a massive shock to us.

We are a lot better than we showed on Saturday, we just didn't have the energy levels that our style needs to work, it looked to me like the 3 weeks without a league game affected us far more than it should have.

[Ron Manager]

I think many of us (me included) were expecting a win over a club who appeared to be in dissaray. Not 4-0,5-1 etc but something like 2-0
and we didnt get it. Paul Lambert and his coaching staff show no signs that they are capable of organising a defence that can keep the ball out of our net.They have been at Villa Park quite long enough to have improved things in this respect.

Other than that he is doing a good job with limited finance. But I think some of you overrate his abilities.I dont think he will prove to be another Sir Alex.

Lets hope for an improved performance and a draw at the very least from Norwich.

[supertom]

It's hard not to be negative after 3 years of relegation scrapping, and starting this season having not addressed many of the reasons behind our struggles of late. I like Lambert, but I do feel sometimes that he needs a more experienced head working with him, or at least a tactically astute number two. I mean with O Neill for example it was considered by some that the tactical side was left for Robertson to deal with. Now granted we weren't always the most fantastic side to watch, but we finished 6th, 3 years running for good reason. Even Redknapp is apparently not much of a tactician, but even if the man doing the motivating isn't, you need someone in the coaching team who can fine tune everything. We don't appear to really have that.

I see us being very good at being able to pick teams off on the counter, when they leave themselves exposed. The trouble is, if teams don't give us the space, we have no other plan. We have an innate inability, largely down to our dire defending, to grind out results. Some games you really need to just dig deep and scrape out a result. We could do that under O Neill. It appeared McLeishs only course of action (and often failed). We can't expect to just counter attack our way to mid-table comfort.

Again, I understand the work in progress thing. I understand it'll take time. But if you spend too many seasons fighting relegation, eventually you'll slip through the trap door. Ask Wigan.

One of my main hopes this season was that Lambert would stop making some of those truly baffling decisions he was prone to last year. They've been slipping back in though. The 4-2-4 business is utter madness.
But more so than baffling decisions it's his inability to identify key aspects of a match in progress, particularly when we're getting ruthlessly exploited in some way. Ben Arfa for example. He spent the whole game murdering our fullbacks (mostly Tony, with the occasional break to murder Lowton). If you want to manage at this level, for a club this size, you have to do something, anything to try and counter a situation like this. He didn't.

I recall us playing Spurs a few years back. Ash Young was absolutely destroying their fullback (Corluka?) and IIRC Redknapp made a change at half time and suddenly Young was a lot quieter.

[supertom]

I think many of us (me included) were expecting a win over a club who appeared to be in dissaray. Not 4-0,5-1 etc but something like 2-0
and we didnt get it. Paul Lambert and his coaching staff show no signs that they are capable of organising a defence that can keep the ball out of our net.They have been at Villa Park quite long enough to improve things in this respect.

Other than that he is doing a good job with limited finance. But I think some of you overrate his abilities.I dont think he will prove to be another Sir Alex.

Lets hope for an improved performance and a draw at the very least from Norwich.

I think to some extent we did underestimate Newcastle. They've got some quality players there, and certainly in B.A a game changer. Despite all the summer furore surrounding Kinnear and Ashley, they've been fairly solid so far. A lot was made of the disappointing French contingent from Jan, but if they gel and finally get used to this league, there's real quality there. A lot was expected of Gouffran a few years back for example.

[PaulWinch again]

I think 'giving Lambert till Christmas' is massively over the top. Overall I like what he's doing at the club and I think it's leading in the right direction. However he does need to address some issues, namely our appalling defensive record and our awful home form. I think he has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to defending, and I think he's too rigid in his tactics at home.

[Ads]

I get Chico’s point and my reaction on Saturday was one of horribly frustrated annoyance.

I think the idea of “giving Lambert till Christmas” is a duff idea. If Lambert doesn’t work out, then short of Risso’s lunatic suggestions, where on Earth do we go to next?

It was a terrible performance from a lot of players, something completely out of character with the previous three games, but generally in keeping with the awful home form.

The more I think about it, the more I think having three weeks off didn’t help.

[not3bad]

We were shit on Saturday and I'm still feeling the dissapointment but I remind myself we are a young team and we will have stinkers like that.  But there are long term worries that need to be addressed:

 - Continuuing failure to get a clean sheet
 - Poor home form, not just on lambert's watch but for every season since O'Dreary's time (excluding possibly his first season)

People could exuse the Chelsea and Liverpool results because of the opposition and the effort Villa put into those games, but I think we genuinely expected to turn Newcastle over.  The overreaction is somewhat predictable.

[supertom]

Sacking Lambert at xmas would do absolutely nothing for us. We couldnt get a better replacement, and the new man would come inherit a very young squad, of which, if Lambert has been in a position to get sacked, may not actually be good enough for this level. There'd be no money or time to do much in january either.

However at some point we have to move on from being relegation battlers, so come next summer, if we've finished just a couple of points above the drop zone again, it might not be enough for Lambo to keep the job.

Building for the future is all well and good, but there needs to be a noticeable improvement each season.

[Nelly]

Just a question really; were we really that bad against Newcastle? A friend who went said he couldn't believe the negativity from fans because in his opinion Villa were trying to play a more patient, possession based game, rather than a more gung-ho approach.

If that was the case, is that something we as fans need to adjust to? Just because we're not lumping it forward and we're willing to be patient doesn't make us shit, surely? In my opinio,  we could do with that attacking midfielder to help turn possession into potential chances.

[django]

We're a mid table team. We will have more disappointing performances, some more unexpected wins and pick up enough points from the promoted teams and those around us to stay up and probably finish with another 4-8 points or so than last year. Those points would have seen us finish between 11th and 8th had we got them last season and probably would do the same this season.

Coming out of the close season there is always a sense of unrealistic optimism about what might happen, and the Arsenal result meant that it lasted a bit longer, but unless we were going to finish in the top 6 (not going to happen) our season will be much like last years but with another couple of wins so we'd better get used to it.