Match Day Thread Aston Villa versus Norwich City

I don't doubt that DF understands the facts of our situation, I just don't think he takes the same view as some as to what the solutions are. I think the long term plan for the club to become an established PL team is not built on experimenting with our playing philosophy. As HistoryRepeating and many others have said, generally speaking (when we have 2 fit established CB's available) our performances have been pretty good. Y es we could make some major changes and possibly get a few more points, or not, but DF is focused on performance not results. That's not to say results don't matter, but it's not as though we aren't producing performances that apart from small margins should really result in us accumulating more points.

 

We have got to this stage with a very young squad who are still developing and it will take good coaching and patience to develop those players. They won't get better game on game, but by the end of the season the improvements should be noticeable. I think I'm right in saying that all our key players are on long contracts. Just think even if we go down, how much the experience would assist their development. If we did go down and came straight back up with effectively the same squad how much stronger we could be. So for me major changes are not not needed, yes some tweeking, but in general lets stick to our playing philosophy, continue to develop our players and see where it takes us. After all we've tried other approaches and failed.

 

19 played 19 remaining and 7 points from safety rock bottom of the pile.

We have been extremely unlucky with injuries and every keeper we come up against seems to have his best day .

We are probably going to get relegated but we are playing well and creating chances so results may change over the second half.
Losing Godfrey long term on top of Klose is another massive setback.

 

Things can change very quickly, 25th of October Southampton get thrash 9 -0 by Leicester and Southampton fan 's were all doom and gloom and expecting relegation 2 months later on the back of 4 wins & a draw and things look very different.

 

Things can change certainly but there are tweaks that would help that happen, like keeping our defensive shape as we work the ball forward. This doesn't mean sitting back or changing our style of play, just balancing defence and attack. It's more than coincidence that every time the opposition have scored first we've lost. We should continue to work the ball forward, but not so as to leave us vulnerable at the back.

I'm still solid with the long term plan, but I'd like to see us making the tweaks that could turn good performances into wins rather than losses. We are that close to doing so that it's frustrating to see us not learning from experience. Our play visibly dropped after the goal went in. The defence didn't fail, but the cover in front of it did and Hourihane took full advantage. Had Tettey and Trybull kept their shape, he wouldn't have had the space to shoot. One lapse, one goal, another loss. We need to look at what other teams are doing to us and learn from it or the losses will go on and on.

 

The facts are not "my facts"; what you mean is that they are a sub-set of facts that I choose to focus on. By the same token, what you call performance is "your performance". Do you really think that conceding an average of 2 goals a game is the mark of a team "performing pretty well"?

The concerns that both I and RiverEndRick have been expressing are nothing to do with short termism. Decades of statistics from every top league in the world show that success is primarily built, not on chance creation and goals, but on chance prevention and clean sheets. Unless that is built into our playing philosophy, whenever we venture into the EPL our experience will be the same as this year, as it was under Alex Neil, for the same reason.

"Better" players, either bought in or developed, cannot make a flawed structure successful. Here's another fact: every other team you might reasonably regard as fellow-candidates for relegation has managed to beat us. Even quite modestly equipped teams have proved capable of exploiting the flaws in our defensive structure. There is nothing short term about calling for adjustments to our approach. Why wait until next season to make those adjustments when making them now might just do the trick this season? And if we are not going to make the adjustments next season, then history really is going to keep on repeating itself.

 

Also, going on about "thin margins" is useless. Football is a game of "thin margins" -- as any cup upset illustrates. Virtually every single game is decided by thin margins. Our margins are no thinner than anyone else's.