Norwich v Villa Post-Match Thread

[oswald funkletrumpet]

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

[Jockey Randall]

What an absolute colossal turd of a performance. Everyone to a man had a stinker.
It seems in those last 2 away games that both Leeds and Norwich worked out if you get in our faces and give us no time on the ball we end up panicking and passing it back to elphick or gollini for a hail mary. They either need to grow a pair and pass as a team or get Gestede in if they're not confident enough to do that.

[Ads]

The balance was all wrong. We cannot play a two man midfield, he knows this, so why have we reverted to it in the last three games where we've been woeful?

We need legs; Bacuna or Tshibola. Even Westwood and Gardner with Jedinak wouldn't be quite so bad.

Stop shoehorning players in! Adomah is a winger and gives balance; Kodjia and Ayew aren't, Grealish is.

Why is Gabby anywhere near the squad? No service but he was absolutely horrendous and his touch for their goal was laughable.

Elphick is dire. We need a centre half asap.

[kippaxvilla2]

£50m was it we spent in the summer and still half a side from being a decent force in this league which let's face it is very low on quality.

[JD]

Absolutely abysmal. Sounds like we were as bad as our worst performances of the season.

[Richard E]

I thought we were all right in the first half without being that threatening or spectacular and that we had probably laid the foundations for a classic smash and grab away win in the second half but after the interval none of our more attacking players were in the game at all. We seemed to lose all momentum. Amavi and Jack in particular were quite lively in the first half but non-existent in the second.     

[avfcpg]

The balance was all wrong. We cannot play a two man midfield, he knows this, so why have we reverted to it in the last three games where we've been woeful?

We need legs; Bacuna or Tshibola. Even Westwood and Gardner with Jedinak wouldn't be quite so bad.

Stop shoehorning players in! Adomah is a winger and gives balance; Kodjia and Ayew aren't, Grealish is.

Why is Gabby anywhere near the squad? No service but he was absolutely horrendous and his touch for their goal was laughable.

Elphick is dire. We need a centre half asap.

Totally this...

[Gareth]

For Sunday hope Baker is fit then I'd do for;

                Gollini
Bacuna Chester Baker Amavi
        Jedinak Tshibola
               Gardner
Grealish            McCormack
                Kodjia

Sarkic
Cissokho
Gestede
RHM
Hutton
Hale
Ayew

Got to get energy & strength into centre midfield, we started well under Bruce with 3 in centre and need to back to that until he can buy a player to go alongside Jedinak who is better than what we have.  Have included Hale on the bench as the couple of games I've seen him in he seem up for fight, also Lyden not yet fit to include.  Hutton, Cissohko & Ayew get seats by default for me, hopefully all 3 will be gone alongside Westwood soon.

[in exile]

Lets admit it we are up shit creek in certain areas of team selection, ie Defence.
But I can not for the life of me figure out why Tshibola and Hepburn-Murphy were not included in place of Westwood and Agbonlahor. You know exactly what you are going to get performance wise from the latter two.

A very disappointing performance from a side we were all excited about a game ago

[Richard E]

I'm not sure the defence is quite that bad - we are not shipping tons of goals every week. The problem for me is that we are not scoring nearly enough with the attacking options we have.

[oldhill_avfc]

Bruce might have made a couple of poor choices in terms of selection and tactics for this one.

The over-riding point though is that the performance surely crystallises for him what we already know.

Gollini, Elphick, Westwood, Gabby, Hutton - not fit for purpose
Amavi, Ayew - flatter to deceive, might just about be ok as back up
Adomah, Jedinak - do a job at this level but no more
Kodija - good at this level and has potential
Grealish - has got quality, who knows what he's capable of when we only see him play with that lot above.

Bruce has done well so far to get that lot even being talked about as potentially one of the play off teams.

.

[Ads]

Amavi was the best player in a Villa shirt by a mile. Got caught out twice; once in the first half because he won three successive challenges but no Villa player closed the space so they dinked it in behind him and the other in the second where he jumped.

[ktvillan]

That was probably as bad as many of our performances over the last 5 years or so.  Not just this game but Leeds as well, Wigan, maybe one or two others, the "quality" of the football is dire, and I can't get my head around Bruce preferring Hutton, Westwood and Agbonlahor to Bacuna, Tshibola, Green, Hepburn-Murphy, and in the case of Gabby pretty much anyone else you can think of.  With no midfield to speak of it was hoof time.   I think the new manager bounce has long since ended and I have some serious concerns about Bruce's selections and tactics.  Fuck Gabby and a few others off in the window and buy a bloody midfield for feck's sake.

[Jimbo]

There's no shape to the team. That's the main problem at the moment. Yes, Agbonlahor should never play for us again, and Westwood is not a footballer, he just runs around bit. But if the team had shape, even those embarrassing excuses for footballers could slot in from time to time and not cause too much harm.

It's going to take time to mould that shape. Perhaps another transfer window or two. We're building from the wreckage and rubble of the last five years, and promotion this season was never anything but a flight of fancy. We need to be patient.

[Clark W Griswold]

Midfield is the problem, if you two players with legs either side of Jedinak, a box to box player who can tackle and chip in with a few goals, and a player that can get forward to join attacks, link with the forwards and chip in with a reasonable goal haul it would make all the difference. The defence is weaker with Elphick rather than Baker and if you put a cherry on top you'd replace the goalkeeper with experience and reliability but that's about it.