Things I've heard on here this season

[Steve R]

...
Would it be fair to say that a lot of Villa fans back in 1987 had seen the club play in the lower divisions, so the impact of relegation wouldn't have been so shocking?  I would say that there are a lot of supporters these days who have only ever seen Villa play in the top flight (and been fairly high placed for most of that time), so relegation for that generation of supporters would be a lot worse.
 

It was the fourth and worst relegation by some distance for me. Probably more my perception than anything.

They were all gut wrenching disappointments, but in 59 and especially 70 we had reason to believe we would soon be back. 67 should have been the worst by some distance but for some reason many still spoke of returning quickly as we had done before until reality set in. There may also have been an element of having spent a few seasons scraping safety maybe we'd got used to the idea. Most fans had only known what had been mostly a lower table team.

87 wasn't just relegation. It was stark reinforcement that the European Champions of a few years previously were no more, and then some. A bum outfit seemingly about to endure an ice age. Thank fuck for Graham Taylor.

There won't be a 2013 but we were very lucky there wasn't a 2012. That would have been very difficult to recover from.

[N'ZMAV]

It's hard to recover from a Relagation these days, not saying it wasn't back then, but is there a bigger gulf these days between the top 2 leagues? You have to do what Newcastle did, and try and keep it together as much as possible and go for it straight away. Else, you end up like so many clubs, big clubs, like Leeds and Forest.

[Billy Walker]

Villa are a top flight club and one of the great names in football, full stop.

I can't think of any reason/situation to justify relegation.  A club has to have basic standards and levels of expectation and lower tier football (as enjoyable as the novelty was for supporters in the past) is not acceptable for a club of our size and history - that's not meant in an arrogant way, by the way.  We created the league and have spent over one hundred years in the top flight, for us to even accept a relegation as a positive flies in the face of all that history and tradition.

The occasions when we have suffered relegation are real low points for me and testimony to poor leadership/decision making at Boardroom level.  (Particularly Doug Ellis's catastrophic handling of the club in the 1980's.  European Champs to relegation non-entities in five years really took some doing.) 

[Percy McCarthy]

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season. How long did it take Lambert to change systems successfully? Three days?

[PeterWithesShin]

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season. How long did it take Lambert to change systems successfully? Three days?

Mainly thanks to a whole different defence than Houllier had to work with.

[danno]

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season. How long did it take Lambert to change systems successfully? Three days?

Wasn't Houllier just saying that to buy himself some time?
It looked to me like his "solution" would involve Warnock Dunne Collins leaving.

[PeterWithesShin]

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season. How long did it take Lambert to change systems successfully? Three days?

Wasn't Houllier just saying that to buy himself some time?
It looked to me like his "solution" would involve Warnock Dunne Collins leaving.

Which would appear to be Lambert's as well.

[danno]

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season. How long did it take Lambert to change systems successfully? Three days?

Wasn't Houllier just saying that to buy himself some time?
It looked to me like his "solution" would involve Warnock Dunne Collins leaving.

Which would appear to be Lambert's as well.

works for me!

[PeterWithesShin]

And me, i've no complaints about seeing the back of that lot.

[Percy McCarthy]

Funny how it took him minutes to change that defence for the worse.

[PeterWithesShin]

Funny how it took him minutes to change that defence for the worse.

The great defence that conceded 7 at Chelsea and 6 at Newcastle before Houllier was even here?

[Chris Smith]

Funny how it took him minutes to change that defence for the worse.

The great defence that conceded 7 at Chelsea and 6 at Newcastle before Houllier was even here?

That's using the facts a little selectively, in neither of those games were we able to play our first choice defence. It's a matter of record that we had a strong defensive record in MON's final season and the Chelsea game was an aberration. We were a defensive shambles the following season both before and during Houllier's time.

[PeterWithesShin]

The defence at Chelsea was Collins, Dunne, Warnock, Young. The defence at Newcastle was Dunne, Clark, Warnock, Young.

Not much off our first choice in either game.

[Mister E]

The defence at Chelsea was Collins, Dunne, Warnock, Young. The defence at Newcastle was Dunne, Clark, Warnock, Young.

Not much off our first choice in either game.

When I watched that 7-1 game at Chelsea, my over-riding thought was that this was a real one-off, with Deko having a blinding 25 minute purple patch. We were well worth the 1-1 score through the first half. Have to say I didn't at the time see it as a collapsing edifice of a defence (as it became).
And

An amazing one for me was how many, including the press as well as posters on here, swallowed Hollier's line of not being able to address problems with the defence until the close-season

I just didn't get that comment from GHou! It seemed easy enough for a decent coach to re-set the defence more effectively; unless he and GMac had already given up on The Collins Gang.

[Chris Smith]

The defence at Chelsea was Collins, Dunne, Warnock, Young. The defence at Newcastle was Dunne, Clark, Warnock, Young.

Not much off our first choice in either game.

The point about the Chelsea game was that many on here were convinced that we'd be better by playing Young instead of Cuellar, we tried it and were a complete shambles. To take that result as representative of our defensive performances for that season is stretching credulity to breaking point.

Under Houllier, first, second, third and fourth choice defences were equally bad. The players were mostly to blame but, as manager, he has to take some of the responsibility.