Czarnikjak

So now he can't even get into Ipswich U23 team Looks like it's WBA conspiracy to destroy his career.

So do you expect us to get European football this season? Genuine question.

more than you believe, more than you believe...

Excellent summary of our situation. The question is, will Smith have the balls to drop one of Watkins-Ings (if he agrees with that assessment in the first place). His reluctance to drop hopeless Barkley last season (until our season petered out and it was too late), might suggest he has not.

To join up with England He had disrupted preseason but he will come back stronger from the internalitonal break.

My point is that when these creative players play, Ings will not benefit from it as he will be on the bench. Ings is not suited to play single striker as well as Ollie is, he just doesn't have the physical presence to do it.

They are benched to accommodate 2 strikers on the pitch.

Neither Buendia nor Traore ever in their careers played on the left wing. Not sure why. It's really down to El Ghazi or Young ( having watched JPB in last U23 game, he is defo not ready to start PL game) on LW if Bailey is not fit. I don't fancy any of these 2 options.

I agree that switch to 4-3-3 is needed. I'm just worried that our LW options are not good enough if Bailey is still not fit to start. It would mean El Ghazi starting, I am not a big fan of that.

Apologies for the LOL, couldn't help myself. If you are concerned about health of the pyramid you are barking at the wrong tree. It's not SKy who decides how the money is distributed. They just pay the money to Premier League and they decide who gets how much. Premier League could scrap the "facility" fee and redistribute more money to lower divisions if they wanted to.

Lol, sky are privetly owned business that pays billions of pounds for the privilege of showing Premier League games. Why shouldn't they be entitled to maximise return on their investment?

Yes, it is a vicious circle. I am just saying that I understand why Sky are showing more Arsenal games than ours. Makes perfect business sense for Sky. I don't make a judgement if that fact should entitle Arsenal to receive more money from Sky or not. You could argue that it would be fair, if we talk about any other type of business. Should it be different for football?

I don't think it's that. Sky just simply won't to maximise their return on the investment. They will simply look at the viewing figures. More people are interested in watching Arsenal then Villa. More viewers equals more advertising revenue for Sky.

After few good performances we are probably due a bad one, also Spurs will be fired up to react to the manner of their derby loss. With that in mind, I would take a draw. 1:1 would keep us in top ten and keep the momentum going.

We have an option of another year on him, so it's in our hands.

Only once in his premier league career spanning 7 seasons he scored more than 12 goals. History tells you he is unlikely to stay fit all season and score more than 12 goals.

The "greedy owners" as you call them, don't overspend atm anyway. Glazers and Kronkes don't put their own money into their clubs. Man Utd spend big cause they have big revenue and can legitimately spend big without any help of their owners. Two types of clubs overspend( now or in the past), clubs owned by vanity driven owners (City, Chelsea) and smaller clubs owned by ambitious owners trying to better themselves (Everton, Villa). Salary Cap like you proposing ( salary capped at let's say 70% of revenue with Luxury Tax on top) would have no effect on the likes of ManU as they are already ran in sustainable way. It would also be unlikely to deter the likes of City from overspending as they can afford it. It would only negatively affect teams like us and Everton and make it even more difficult to break up the established elite.

They dominate in terms of possession, passing accuracy and number of shots. Maybe that's what he means.

What this graph doesn't show is the percentage of successful pressures. Ings's is very low at about 12%, Watkins is at over 30%. So yes, Ings runs a lot chasing the ball, but is not very effective at it.

It would hold them back for now, while its still in place. Potential switch to Salary Cap with Luxury Tax would open the door for them to spend though. Let's hope we can keep the Saudis out of them game from selfish Villa's perspective

Oh well, that was dire. I don't think we had a single shot in the 2nd half.

Poor Swinkels at LB again….strong lineup overall.

Can you make the survey more granular? There's big difference between finishing 11th and 17th, it's in one bucket current

You are nailing every point here. Massive effort required to keep the income evenly distributed. It might even be a loosing battle, you are essentially fighting against capitalist instincts. At the end of the day most people in charge of big clubs are here to make money, they will do everything possible to safeguard more revenue for themselves, including making selfish and short-sighted decisions. Let's not pretend Villa are above that. If we were one of the Big 6 clubs at the moment, I am sure Purslow would try the same, push for changes benefiting us and stopping anybody else from breaking into the establishment.

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