Aston Villa vs Swansea post match thread

[OzVilla]

I'm so upset. We are a massive and brilliant club. Thus it's so hard to take . My biggest issue is I care too much.

You and me and everyone else on here.

And knackered next day. I often have to get up at 2am to watch this shit.

[Villafirst]

My big fear is this season may finish the club for many years of competing in the PL if relegation as is likely happens. The teams who stay in the league this season will take a giant leap forward financially and be far ahead of the rest including Villa. Lerner simply has to axe Sherwood now and get Moyes in and needs to invest heavily in January or he'll stand to lose over £100m with the value of the club dropping massively by relegation. A shambles which is scary and depressing.

[Damo70]

My big fear is that having taken my son to home games for the last five or six years social services are going to knock on my door and take him away and charge me with child cruelty. Which would be hard to defend in the circumstances.

[brian green]

My child who accompanied me to the game is 37 years old. He not only has to put up with what goes on in the game, he has to put up with a foul tempered madman of a father.

[pbavfckuwait]

If for no other reason than his bad game management, he should be on his way out of the door.

He placed himself in a position prior to the game "We will win", that at the time of the first Swansea goal, his options were totally limited, a point in our position would have been a point gained, not ideal but a step away from losing every bloody game, he could not shore up the midfield or put on another defender as he had backed himself into a corner before a ball was kicked.

As for the game, Gana played well but after 75 minutes was blowing through his arse as he was the only defensive midfielder we had on the pitch, leading to Naughton being allowed to gallop down the wing and we know the result, he was moaning after the game about late goals being conceded, this is because you leave players out there who have no mental concentration left.

Whilst his quality of cross is awful, Hutton has to be appreciated for his willingness to cover the ground to at least get into those positions to start with, if only Gabby and Gestede  would put in as much movement and effort.

Ayew had a decent enough game and you can see that there is a player there waiting to be discovered, Jack needs to step up, totally missing for most of the time he was on the pitch and Lescott just why??

A good tactician and motivator can still get us out of this, but the top management of the club will have to do something that there track record shows is not their forte, get rid of the wrong man and pick the right one and if doing the one first leaves a couple of weeks gap before we get the right one do it, because we have nothing further to lose than just letting Sherwood carry on.

[peter w]

I haven't gone through the thread so may be making a point already raised. But there is an argument to be made for the pointlessness of sacking Sherwood if the conditions the manager has to work under is overhauled. Not every manager that we employ should produce the same dour football. I think Houllier's reign would have seen him walking as there is no way he would have continued under the same financial restrictions every other manager has worked under.

If, as reported, that some if the players brought in weren't Sherwood's then its no surprise its a mess. Every club has someone feeding in to the player or type if player needed. Taylor and Clough the mist famous example. But its like both camps at Villa had the same type of players needed on their list but it also appears there was no communication between the two 'sides'. So we have plenty of similar players in similar positions and a lack of experience and quality elsewhere.

But watching yesterday where Sherwood gets no credit is that there is no shape. It was like watching an under7 team running around aimlessly. You'd also have 2 or 3 players in the middle all running for the same ball and the one(s) not getting there just stood and watched. It was terrible. It was not possible to identify our plan, what we were trying to do other than the odd lump to Gestede.

By playing Bacuna in the middle - who to be fair put in a shift whoever ineffective - meant that when we needed to make a change to chase the game we had to leave our soft centre alone. If taking Gabby off then replace with a Sanchez or Westwood as we were losing the game in the middle. We didn't and we were totally at sea.

The problem with the subs bench was that we were never going to take Gestede off. He should have gone instead of Gabby. If Gabby was knackered then stick an interested Ayew up front. He was in the mood but playing too deep. Up top with only a man to beat and he would have filled his boots. That Sherwood didn't recognise that says it all. Its just set up terribly and despite the very real problems I mentioned at the top Sherwood can't set a team up. He's cost us 6 winning points at Leicester and home to Swansea now. He has just got to go.

[Chris Smith]

Any manager going through a bad run must look at the fixtures and be delighted when we are their next opponents.

It was just shambolic yesterday, no structure or cohesion. He has to go now.

[Olof's Beard]

I could see what the plan was. It was experiment no.1456 by Sherwood - high pressing using all the players who had the best 'pace' stats on Football Manager. They were told to go and hound Swansea deep in their own half and in the early exchanges we actually won a bit of possession. The problem? I think we broke the world record for the shortest period to elapse before a plan was found out and stopped working. I made it around three and a half minutes. After that, there was no shape and the players looked like they had just met in the tunnel, as usual.

[peter w]

And why are so confused by the art of passing the ball. Hardly anything to feet. Throws to Gestede with only Gabby looking for a flick behind him. Nobody inside. Wrong decisions when simple through ball would suffice. One point in the first half a quick ball through to Gabby and he was away. Instead Bacuna or Gana decided to run across the pitch and give it Ayew who by then was surrounded by Swansea players with no-one offering any support.

Those who I thought did well will get a shout out...Guzan, Hutton, Ayew, and Richards. I didn't think Gabby was too bad either and picked out a good ball for Ayew to score. The players are there. We can stay up. We need to start playing as a unit and fast.

[AlexAlexCropley]

Bottom line, the players aren't good enough-individually or collectively.
Glimpses here and there such as Gana not enough, especially if he goes to pot late on in games.Maybe a new manager could rustle a few points but nowhere near enough for survival.
Yesterday was the least jumpy-up at a Villa goal I've been , solely because I felt we would fail to capitalise and concede.No confidence in this team.

[Clampy]

I don't think we played that badly yesterday but despite us scoring, you could just sense them coming back into it and this is where Tim let's himself down. Another holding midfielder and fresh pair of legs would have helped tighten things up. Also, i'm amazed Gestede stayed on for the 90 minutes. I think Sherwood will get the Southampton game then after that who knows.

[pauliewalnuts]

Gestede getting the entire 90 minutes was just bizarre. Contributed nothing, just nothing.

[Jimbo]

I take the point that the owners of the club can't be blamed directly for the poor coaching, tactical ineptitude, selection blunders and the inability of players to perform the basic skills of the game,  but if anyone seriously thinks that Villa's deep seated problems can be cured by the appointment of yet another new Manager, then they are seriously deluded. Our club has been brought to its current dismal and depressing plight by the people who have run it for the past four or five disastrous years and who appointed Houllier, McLeish, Lambert and Sherwood. Not only were these poor choices, they were compounded by a campaign of austerity imposed on the club to rescue it from O'Neill's profligacy; a profligacy, by the way, encouraged by a guileless and naive owner who thought he'd inherited a managerial genius. Lerner's casual, lazy, remote and long distance ownership style allowed O'Neill to run the Villa like his own personal fiefdom and the club was virtually a financial basket case in terms of its day-to-day solvency before Lerner woke up and tried to rein O'Neill in. The self-important and overrated Ulsterman then stormed off in a huff and left us in the lurch on the cusp of a new season and our current plight can be plotted all the way back to those fateful days.

The story since has been a tragic catalogue of botched managerial appointments and shoestring investment from an increasingly resentful owner and I fear the worst run club in the top flight over the last five years will meet its just deserts in May and become a Championship club, just at the very time that the Premiership gravy train really does arrive at the station.

Oh dear, the very irony of it all.

As good a summary of our situation as you'll find.

I was at VP yesterday - a rare outing for me, courtesy of a friend's spare season ticket (I'm not paying to watch that crap) - and what struck me as Swansea's inevitable second went in was the lack of anger. The fans just took it in the chin and, apart from a chorus of boos at full time, there was hardly a murmur of disquiet. Sherwood didn't get his Bolton moment. They've broken us.

[Nelly]

randy will be remembered as a bit of a bungling buffoon who played the game and lost a few million, and certainly despised by all Villa

I must say I don't despise Lerner. He's a victim of his own naiivity perhaps but I think he's has genuinely tried to always to do right by the Villa. He's been let down badly by the people he's hired he's responsible for that and of course responsible for whichever course Villa take, but I definitely don't despise him.

[mr underhill]

of course you could argue quite compellingly that he's always hired the wrong people and more enlightened appointments wouldn't have resulted in such misery