Heroes & Villains, the Aston Villa fanzine
Heroes & Villains => Heroes Discussion => Topic started by: Toronto Villa on November 09, 2025, 06:14:14 PM
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A massive opportunity now to really embed ourselves in the top positions of the EL and PL over the next 5 games.
Nov 23rd - PL - Leeds (16th) - A
Nov 27th - EL - Young Boys (22nd) - H
Nov 30th - PL - Wolves (20th) - H
Dec 3rd - PL - Brighton (11th) - A
Dec 6th - PL - Arsenal (1st) - H
Arsenal the toughest but still a good chance to get 5 wins in that.
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All of those teams are shit. Five wins imo.
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Brighton away and Leeds away aren’t easy. Our away form is going to need to improve if we’re to expect 6 points from those two.
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Anything less than 15 points and Unai's job will be under threat.
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
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7 points from the prem league games would be good.
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I hate these threads.
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‘Critical’ why are they critical?
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
It’s 9/11 today as well.
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
It’s 9/11 today as well.
Good point well made.
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I hate these threads.
Yes.
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I hate these threads.
Yes.
I used to do these many years back and they were quietly retired when we turned to shit as it was getting depressing predicting 4 losses every month.
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
🙄
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I hate these threads.
Of course like any thread you could have ignored it.
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
🙄
Thank you
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I know you live in Canada but can we please have the dates in the correct format
🙄
Thank you
It’s fine mate. I do forget sometimes myself.
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I hate these threads.
Yes.
There is a reason football players and managers spout cliches about ‘one game at a time’.
BUT, we’re going to win the league if we beat these teams.
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I hate these threads.
Me too. Especially given our “easy” start to the season.
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I hate these threads.
Of course like any thread you could have ignored it.
I'd still know it existed. Which is A Bad Thing.
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good, thanks
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The next 5 or the next 1 , 2 3 or 4 are always critical, important, significant or whatever.
I get a sinking feeling when someone then says we can win them all.
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That's perfectly natural if you're a Villa fan.
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Nov 23rd - PL - Leeds (16th) - A Win but tough - need to silence the crowd early
Nov 27th - EL - Young Boys (22nd) - H Unless we collectively have a brain fart - should be easy win
Nov 30th - PL - Wolves (20th) - H - New manager bounce? Should be winning this as all said and done they are shit
Dec 3rd - PL - Brighton (11th) - A Not easy but have a decent record there and Emery does well against their Manager - would accept a tight draw
Dec 6th - PL - Arsenal (1st) - H Terribly unlucky to lose to them last year - if we still have positive momentum from the previous games then i fancy us - we need the same intensity we hit Bournemouth with as them London fancy dans don't like it up em! A draw is no bad thing but i fancy us
And if all goes to plan - still no serious mention of our ambitions or the job Emery is doing by the biased media
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The results outlined by Hookeysmith would be acceptable.
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I hope wolves win prior to playing us, and any forward who has not scored for 27 months gets one before us as well.
Edit. Oh and of course the new manager bounce happens the game before as well.
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None of the games are critical to our overall ambition of finishing top 4 or 5 and top 8 in the Europa.
But if we can get back on a run in the three league games prior to Arsenal, who I think could well shed points over the next few matches (Spudz, Chelsea), that would raise the tantalising prospect of us being virtually within striking distance of them when they come to Villa Park.
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My only concern is it's a lot of games in a very short period of time. Playing cloggers like Dirty Leeds and the WWWW Wanderers not only do we need to pick up the 6 points but come out of those games injury free.
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My only concern is it's a lot of games in a very short period of time. Playing cloggers like Dirty Leeds and the WWWW Wanderers not only do we need to pick up the 6 points but come out of those games injury free.
Agreed, which is why I'm not much fussed about Young Boys - we can afford to rotate significantly there without jeopardising a top 8 finish unduly.
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good, thanks
A positive and polite first post.
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I think we will get four wins and a draw with Arsenal.
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Couldn't really find a suitable place to put this, but it finishes by talking about the next few games so here will do. F365's club "mood rankings"
4) Aston Villa (17)
It’s already been a season of two halves for Aston Villa, which is a decent effort really when we’re not even a third of the way through the thing.
For six games it really was bleak, the disappointment at how last season ended bleeding into a moribund start to this campaign, one in which five of their first six games ended either 0-0, 1-1 or a 1-0 defeat with the one exception a 3-0 paddling from Crystal Palace.
It really did look and feel like something coming to an end. A bold and often brilliant attempt to disrupt the established Premier League elite under the astute leadership of Unai Emery, a manager who really quite recently found a club battling against relegation back to the Championship.
Didn’t feel at all right that it might happen with nothing tangible to show for it, Villa having bollocksed some pretty presentable trophy opportunities, including but not limited to last season’s FA Cup and the Europa Conference League the year before – a competition not even West Ham had managed to West Ham up.
But now, 10 games and eight wins later? All is once again well and the positive vibes are there for all to see. They’ve started beating decent teams in compelling fashion, even if the two defeats during that run are curiosities – against mid-crisis Liverpool in the Premier League and at Go Ahead Eagles in the Europa League.
That Europa League defeat feels particularly incongruous, sitting as it does between deserved wins over Spurs and Man City in the league but also in stark contrast to what we think is in fact responsible for turning Villa’s season around.
European football can be a curious beast. It can be both benefit and burden, often in the same season and occasionally even at the exact same time.
Villa and Newcastle are not remotely the same club, but they are essentially trying to achieve the same thing: muscle in on the big boys’ turf. And we really don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that they keep alternating Champions League status at the expense of both each other and whichever Big Six clubs happen to be in the process of fumbling about at that particular time.
Newcastle are doing perfectly well in the Champions League, but its toll is already visible on their doom-spiralling league form. And ‘success’ in a competition you have no realistic chance of actually winning isn’t really worth it when your domestic form suffers.
Villa, by contrast, are in the very winnable indeed Europa League which changes everything. There is not the same stress or toll on the same group of players. There is greater scope for personnel changes and the greater possibility that success in one competition boosts the other rather than the reverse.
We’re not saying Villa are better off out of the Champions League, because who knows how different their summer might have looked had they made it. There’s also the financial implications of which tournament you’re in, which for Villa – who continue to fly close to the PSR wind – are more significant than their rivals.
But missing out on the Champions League isn’t all bad. Spurs fans were widely mocked for ‘celebrating’ their Arsenal-scuppering defeat to Man City that may have cost them a Champions League place. A year later, they won the Europa League.
There really is absolutely no reason Villa can’t go and do the same this season, and even if they don’t the Europa League has already had a positive kick-starting effect on their season. That divide between the bad and good parts of their season to date sits conveniently but not coincidentally on the moment their Europa League campaign began.
And there really is every chance for things to get better yet, with Leeds, Young Boys, Wolves and Brighton to come in the first couple of weeks after the international break, before what does admittedly look like an absolute tw*t of a December where they have to play Man United, Chelsea and for some reason Arsenal twice.
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And there really is every chance for things to get better yet, with Leeds, Young Boys, Wolves and Brighton to come in the first couple of weeks after the international break, before what does admittedly look like an absolute tw*t of a December where they have to play Man United, Chelsea and for some reason Arsenal twice.
Glad they mentioned this - thought it was just me who thought it weird we were playing both fixtures in the same month, and before (unless I'm mistaken) we complete the full round of ties.
Still, that December run looks like the kind of series we generally do better than expected under Unai. If only we can pick the low hanging fruit first...
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Does the 17 in brackets mean we're one of the moodiest/grumpiest in the league? I know Brummies form the bulk of our support but come on, I'd say we're collectively enjoying Villa life since Guillem Balague's book came out and turned our form around.
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We were in the last rankings where we were 17th, now 4th so mellowed after the release of the book.
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Go William !
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DWWDL
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Had been hoping that while we picked up maximum points in these three fixtures (Leeds, Wolves, Brighton), Arsenal might just drop a few - no chance of that, by the looks. Shame, I was quite taken by the idea that we could be more or less within striking distance when they turn up at B6.
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Still think we're winning all of these. The hardest one will be Brighton. But they are shit compared to us.
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Told you they were all shit.
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Anything less than 15 points and Unai's job will be under threat.
Buendia keeps him in a job.
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5 wins out of 5. Piece of piss these threads.
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5 wins out of 5. Piece of piss these threads.
👍
You can start another one now.
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Aston Villa have won nine of their last 10 Premier League games. It's the first time they’ve had as many as nine wins in a 10-game spell in the top-flight since December 1919.
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Aston Villa have won nine of their last 10 Premier League games. It's the first time they’ve had as many as nine wins in a 10-game spell in the top-flight since December 1919.
The last time we won 9 out of 10 in the top-flight, it was nineteen n-n-nineteen.
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WWWWWinners
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Anything less than 15 points and Unai's job will be under threat.
I would say he has earned the right to stay till Cmas.
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Aston Villa have won nine of their last 10 Premier League games. It's the first time they’ve had as many as nine wins in a 10-game spell in the top-flight since December 1919.
We won the Cup that season but fell away to 9th in the league. The 1919/20 league season should expunged from the records. The "winners" (their only ever title) was achieved through cheating, clogging, and the fact that everybody was out of practice after a 5 year break. The Smethwick bastards.