At home but where is the comfort?

[danlanza]

I hope you are right Brian , as we all want the club to be successful - the game has changed for the worse in recent years and is not the game i once loved - it is now too much about money and players rarely have the passion and loyalty for clubs we used to take for granted.

I share your hopes and wishes for the future but I think it may be a long time before they come to fruition - In some ways I wish the sky 5 would fuck off and form a European league so we can compete for England's finest trophies again .

eastie, that is one of the best posts for a long time. The top 4-5 are miles infront of the rest of us. Put them in a European league, increase promotion from the lower leagues. But , unfortunately pal, that would not do the Devil, that is Sky, sorry , Devils, BT Sport aswell, any good with their plan to take over football and turn it into a sterile gathering of nobody's, with no clue of history or anything else. Muted support from the stadium,  no standing, no expressing yourself with passion for your team, fear of ejection from the ground. We will just sit there and clap and go home happy, i suppose.
Me, i want safe standing to be introduced to all clubs in the English Premier League. I want atmosphere, singing, jumping around a bit, safely.
Amfy is on a crusade, and a fine crusade it is, to at least get this listened to. Long may she continue, but not to long. We should be able to stand in designated areas of every stadium, safe standing is the way forward.
When the Holte was a standing area away teams would shit themselves at the sheer magnitude of Villa fans behind that end, although it was a bit empty for a few years, but you get what i am trying to say.
We need that atmosphere back at VP. Amfy and her helpers are well on the way to trying to change things.
Lower Holte should be safe standing, lower North should be safe standing. The atmosphere then would scare the hell out of every visiting team. The way it should be. Villa park should be an absolute fortress, at the moment it is not. It has become a sterile, mobile phone using, 4G using theatre of wanabee Villa supporters.
I know we come from the old days but i still feel that we have been forgotten. Proper fans who have spent thousands, over the years, supporting our club, only to be forgotten, because of the Sky Era.
Just my point of view you understand.
Go Amfy, get some atmosphere back into our stadium. All the best to every Villa fan on the planet. 3 lagers, 3 large bacardi's and to finish, a lion bar, and some pickled onion Monster Munch.

[eastie]

Good post too dan, Amfy has been superb in her quest and worked hard - she deserves to succeed .

[ROBBO]

I think Lerners signing of a manager who managed to get our cross city rivals relegated...twice, ignoring the uproar and disbelief it would cause among supporters finally lost any hope i had that under his stewardship we would become a strong club on the field.
I wonder why Randy is still here a stay away owner, is it that he cannot find a buyer? Money aside is there something about us, our city, our accent, our way of always looking at the dark side, that prevents success?
We have a fantastic ground a solid membership base with huge potential to grow, everything it seems for any ambitious owner or manager to take us forward. I reckon you could write a thesis on Villa's continual failure.

[olaftab]

Won the league with Arsenal in 98 I think. 

Don't care. He was a fringe player made 11 appearances all season for them. 

[dave.woodhall]

I think Lerners signing of a manager who managed to get our cross city rivals relegated...twice, ignoring the uproar and disbelief it would cause among supporters finally lost any hope i had that under his stewardship we would become a strong club on the field.
I wonder why Randy is still here a stay away owner, is it that he cannot find a buyer? Money aside is there something about us, our city, our accent, our way of always looking at the dark side, that prevents success?
We have a fantastic ground a solid membership base with huge potential to grow, everything it seems for any ambitious owner or manager to take us forward. I reckon you could write a thesis on Villa's continual failure.

I wonder how many clubs' supporters would consider us to have had continued failure - five or six maybe?

[Clampy]

I wouldn't call it continued failure. Mistakes have been made which have set us back and we've blown a couple of good chances of silverware in recent seasons but I wouldn't say it's been a failure.

[ROBBO]

Maybe it's my perspective but anytime we cannot be looked upon as one of the premier clubs in the country not one that is continually looking behind us, we are failing.

[dave.woodhall]

Maybe it's my perspective but anytime we cannot be looked upon as one of the premier clubs in the country not one that is continually looking behind us, we are failing.

Remind me of how many times in the last 100 years we've been regarded as one of the top clubs in the country.

[KevinGage]

The 1960's and now is probably just about the only era when we haven't been regarded as one of the top sides.

[dave.woodhall]

The 1960's and now is probably just about the only era when we haven't been regarded as one of the top sides.

How do you work that out based on the fact that we were relegated in the fifties and eighties, spent half of the seventies outside the top division and got a lot closer to relegation in the nineties than we ever have lately?

[Dante Lavelli]

Ten years ago if you had said that Britain would have back to back winners of the Tour de France within the decade you would have been laughed at.   Yes cycling has had a big injection of money but the real sea change in British bike riding has been planning and self belief.

You're spot on here.  This is where i think we have gone wrong.  We've got enough money with Randy, Faulkner is showing that he is good at the admin side but we're lacking a visionary leader like Brailsford who will join all the dots and incrementally force them to improve bit by bit (see Levy at spurs too #spit#).  I think the days of a Ferguson/Wenger coming along and building an entire club on their own are long gone, or at least you're gambling all your income on one man.

[Dante Lavelli]

We need an old school captain who demands respect from team-mates and opponents alike, he needs to be a reducer of the Stuart Pearce ilk.

We also need strikers who have an understanding of the game, not headless chickens like Weimann with all the composure of a stand up comedian on his first night.

We have too many young players staring into the headlights like startled rabbits, adequate players but only that. Lambert is accountable, he should have replaced Petrov with someone of similar experience.

Too many players seem bewildered, unrehearsed, lacking in nouse, enthusiastic but naive. Baker, Weimann, Westwood. It's not beyond hope, they can take heart from Delph who's maturing nicely (apart from his pathetic quest for yellow card record breaking status, most of his bookings are just brainless).

We need blood and snotters, experienced pros and composure.

In my opinion what you're describing there are symptoms rather than the cause of our ills.  The club needs more leadership from the top rather than a chest pumping captain.

[PeterWithe]

With regards to Platt he always had a demeanour that he was doing us a favour in being here, even before he became an England regular. He seemed to believe that adulation was his divine right, even his ridiculously complicated back passes screamed 'look at me'

I can't think of a better player,who didn't leave under a cloud,so ill thought of.

[saunders_heroes]

With regards to Platt he always had a demeanour that he was doing us a favour in being here, even before he became an England regular. He seemed to believe that adulation was his divine right, even his ridiculously complicated back passes screamed 'look at me'

I don't remember anything like that. He was always very popular with the fans while at Villa. In fact I remember a poll in the Evening Mail where he was voted the most popular person in the country (or something like that).  Even when he left he was still popular. It was only when he started being a tv pundit and didn't sing our praises left right and centre that some Villa fans started to get the hump.
Personally I couldn't care less because he did his talking on the pitch for us. He was outstanding in a Villa shirt.

[eastie]

The 1960's and now is probably just about the only era when we haven't been regarded as one of the top sides.

The fact we have won one league title in the last 100 years and one fa cup in the last 90 years suggests your opinion is not quite correct.