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chauncey

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Everything posted by chauncey

  1. Leaving aside the managerial debate: the situation the club is in now is in no way comparable to that of 2004 - we are in a much more precarious position. The teams around us have gotten stronger and they're leaving us behind. Someone used the 'closed shop' metaphor and that's the real danger - not scaremongering. Them's the facts and if you don't believe me take a look at the league table.
  2. Superbad - 7/10 Occasionally very funny but a bit too 'bromantic' (gay) at times. Michael Cera is again more wooden than that fighting tree thing out of Tekken, Mokujin I think it's called. Definitely worth a look but not the lolfest people make it out to be.
  3. It clearly isn't: this squad is going to finish seventh in all likelihood. I think a lot of people simply aren't taking into account just how much Spurs and City have strengthened since last year. We haven't - down to the manager and, by extension, down to the board. Anyway, next season... with the current manager I'd hope we get back into Champions League via fourth or third spot at a push. Without the current coach, well it all depends who replaces him and expectations will have to be raised or, as is more likely, lowered accordingly.
  4. Aside from the fact he'd be nuts to take the job, Kenny's time at Newcastle and stint managing Celtic should be used as the reference points NOT the merits of signing Glen Hysen. Football has moved on so much and the risk of legacy-pissing (especially with the fickle whoppers who proliferate Anfield these days) it'd be a recipe for heartbreak.
  5. Don't know about that, but she has definitely cancelled her livery for next year.
  6. Ancelloti did just that, AND he had the best player in the world at his disposal. Got an answer for that one?
  7. If, as many predict, Rafa does leave then O'Neill will be touting himself big style - in fact he's already started with all this 'I deserve more credit' bollocks. From the same article: The litigious autist clearly fancies himself a "marquee job" and lets hope for all our sakes he ends up down the East Lancs. If we're stooping to that level of manager I'd sooner have McLeish... Jesus fuck can anyone else not see how much of a step down these names are from what we currently have?
  8. So was the OP a wind-up or not? Also, the number of soft cunts negging my Evertonian comment is frightening... you can't ALL be that stupid.
  9. You've missed the point I'm trying to make: both of those facts neither qualify nor disqualify him from making a good Liverpool manager. They're both irrelevancies and the only reason I brought up the Everton 'thing' was to show how pointless it is to appoint (or in this case rule out) a manager on such bases. In short: what the fuck does Carra's status as a top bloke and professional, who clearly loves the club, have to do with him becoming a coach good enough for LFC?
  10. Well if his "charity work and community work" can be used in the argument for, I don't see why my equally spurious and irrelevant tidbit cannot be used in the argument against.
  11. Fair enough. One awful season does not an awful manager make - the Benitez Out Brigade (ROBERT) should be careful what they wish for.
  12. Iain Dowie for assistant! Wasn't Carra engaging in similar brinkmanship in the press re: his own contract/status just last month?
  13. Ridiculously excited about this game. GTA series has gone massively stale in my opinion and this will certainly re-invigorate the genre. Can't argue with a bit of posse action.
  14. Still on the coach tweeting.
  15. Already started but the man was a genius. There's an excellent documentary on at half 10 for anyone who cares.
  16. Tuesday has brought the internet rumour that Martin O'Neill had stomped out of Aston Villa and Thursday has already generated a tour de force that would have impressed a barrister, which is what he might have become had he not run into Brian Clough. After impaling his critics with an impassioned defence of his four years at Villa Park O'Neill sits back to consider the biggest question. Does he really need this hassle? "I wake up a number of mornings and convince myself that I need this. Sometimes it takes longer to convince myself that I need it," he says, smiling now. "Occasionally I have to work harder at it and it might take me into the afternoon to convince myself I need it." Villa's training ground at Bodymoor Heath is still humming from O'Neill's decision to "fight back" in the wake of the team's 7-1 trouncing by Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Along every corridor there is a sense that a major piece of theatre has been enacted. The Villa manager has left open the possibility that he may consider his position in the summer before issuing a statement to dampen speculation that he will leave if Randy Lerner, Villa's American owner, switches off the transfer-money pump at £80m. O'Neill, whose side won at Bolton yesterday, had constructed an imaginary court around himself and attacked the prosecution's case with gusto. This was real stagecraft: a fine manager taking a stand against shallowness and negativity in the claret and blue half of Birmingham. Now, as a long afternoon of punch and counter-punch is expiring, he explains in greater detail his resistance to those who say the 7-1 defeat in London and the team's failure to secure the fourth Champions League spot for a third consecutive season would be terminal to his dream of establishing Villa as a conquering force. "I've got two daughters who have grown up with this man, it's my background, it's my Catholic Irish nationalist background which feels that disaster is upon you any day that you have a good day," he says. "So, what I think is this: You should have this air of confidence and, while you can have it in your own demeanour, you should not be self-deprecating to the extent that what happens is people hammer the crap out of you." Having people "hammer the crap out of you" must be close to being included in every Premier League manager's contract as a health and safety warning. Villa, who face their tormentors again in Saturday's FA Cup semi-final at Wembley, have beaten Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United (at Old Trafford) in this campaign and reached the Carling Cup final, which they lost to Sir Alex Ferguson's side. But progress in the Premier League has stagnated and O'Neill faced a litany of charges (does not rotate enough, does not give youth a chance, etc) that conspired with Tuesday's internet fiasco to light his fuse. The gossip was that he had fallen out with Lerner over a supposed move by James Milner to Manchester United and that Villa would be needing a new leader. He says: "The man who will sit down and determine a lot of things will be the chairman of the football club but I wanted to say [in his Thursday press conference]: 'Well actually, I will have a part-say in that, because it's my life.' I know that there will be people who will say, 'Well, he's not committed now.' I didn't say that. I actually said I would like to stay on but I will have to evaluate things at the end to see." O'Neill had to be told by Midlands football writers how the blogosphere works. Later, during our interview, he jokes: "I've never had – I'm probably a typical Irishman – a long-term plan and I've ended up in this position. I do retain a great enthusiasm. Of course, there are days, like Tuesday, that make you think that, if something so small so can grow so great, I can actually use this to my advantage because with some shares I have bought I'm going to put on the blog that there's going to be an immediate takeover. "I couldn't even spell blog and my children are incredibly embarrassed that I couldn't open... what do you call it... a computer. But I'm going to. That has got me going. I'm going to learn the computer to deal with it and I'm going to start a couple of rumours in a couple of shares that I have bought and haven't moved a muscle in two years. I'm going to put it on a blog. I've learned all that. It will probably take me a year." Taking a year to do anything in football these days is strictly prohibited. The preferred delivery date is yesterday. In football O'Neill, 58, is held to have at least one more marquee job in him: Liverpool, England, Manchester City or Manchester United would all be on the radar of his agent, if he had one. The "typical Irishman without a long-term plan" has a rolling one-year deal at Villa. He claims not to be a self-promoter: "I don't think I have ever in my managerial time really given my valuation its proper consideration. Honestly. People can turn around and tell you, you are the biggest big-head ever but I actually don't think I've done that. "I don't have an agent, I've never had an agent, I might be the only manager in Europe who doesn't have an agent. What I should do, I should really consider my value a wee bit more. "That sounds big-headed but I said here in my time of trying to fight back – I have been a breath of fresh air to these people, because this club was totally disaffected four years ago." Self-deprecation, he has decided, "is of no benefit to anybody". The context to this friction is the 7-1 defeat and conjecture about Lerner's willingness to go on chasing top-four status when the team keep banging their head on the ceiling that is sixth place, and Tottenham and Manchester City are spending heavily. In his American HQ, some speculate, Lerner is comprehending the futility of trying to break the cartel on £20m net transfer spending per season, and may soon stop the flow. O'Neill says: "If that situation did develop, that wouldn't necessarily mean I would go and down tools and say, 'Well, listen, we can't go any further.' What you would do is see if you can come up with some other ways, maybe through the scheme here with the younger players coming through, maybe with a bit of trading here and there, maybe taking a risk with a major player to be transferred [out] to sort things out. "You wouldn't just down tools. It's not been in my nature to do that. I couldn't envisage that sort of scene – just throwing the toys out of the pram. I feel maybe I should have a say in my career as much as anyone else – that was the point I was trying to make. Actually I didn't make it too cleverly but it doesn't really matter." In this mode O'Neill is a torrent of passion mixed with legalistic precision. With tracksuit trousers tucked in socks, as ever, and eyes blazing behind spectacles, he embarks on several monologues. I ask him: have this Villa side already reached the furthest frontier of their talents? A long pause, then: "I will honestly have a look at it, regardless, at the end of the season and start to analyse it in a wee more detail. For instance, Gareth Barry has left and what appeared to be a gaping hole in our team has actually been very successfully filled by James Milner, who has ended up scoring double figures. That's great. Now, for James to continue to improve he will need ... more help. By that I mean we will need to improve the standard of our player. "We have an up-and-coming young player in Nathan Delfouneso, a young centre-forward who I think is going to be a really decent player, and he can improve our side in time, but asking him to step into a man's job at this minute, to do wonders for us over that last seven games, is asking a lot. But next season he can go from peripheral into the mix and come up trumps. "We need quality if we're going to go there. More quality, and more people than ever before to deal comfortably with the ball, and that doesn't just mean midfield players and a centre-forward, that means defenders. That's where I've been impressed this season. Richard Dunne and James Collins as central defenders are able to deal with the ball, they're comfortable with it at their feet and that's been an improvement." What Villa need now, he says, is: "The kind of quality Tottenham possess in their overall squad. Well done, Harry [Redknapp, the Spurs manager]. Well done for being able to get those things in. I know he got one or two players from Portsmouth, and Portsmouth owed money, but well done. Manchester City, regardless of how the season ends, are going to go stronger again, so for us to compete we need a bit more quality." In this week of blog-slaying and misconception-correcting, this European Cup-winning midfielder from Clough's great Nottingham Forest sides is in no mood to take credit for creating a nursery for England starlets, and is not one to plead for patience, just perspective. "It would make me laugh, make me smile, if some manager came in and said he had a five-year plan for a football club. Fine, if you actually own the football club at the same time." If the Stamford Bridge If the Stamford Bridge pounding served any purpose it was for psychologists searching for an insight into sports-induced pain, because there was a lot of it, for two days, before O'Neill realised Villa had "conceded 23, 24 goals in 29 matches before that, the best record in the Premier League." He says: "I shouldn't allow everything to be affected by the last half-hour of the game." But for a manager whose identity is hewn from defiance, from insatiability, a curious hint of shame crept in. "It's my team and therefore what they do on that field is my responsibility. Where it was hard to take was that the side giving up really meant that I had given up. "I took a long time as a player to get over things. A long time. I was always the last one to get changed. If I thought I was bad as a player, to quote my father, I'm 10 worses now – that old Irish phrase." He recalls a bleak day at Forest: "We got beaten at Derby County one day, 4-1. We were a big team and we went to Derby and got thumped at the Baseball Ground. And Clough [who had managed County] was apoplectic in that little room at Derby, which is akin to a little corridor, right beside where the press are. He didn't care who he offended. He laid into us right, left and centre, for losing." Clough's message, O'Neill says, was: "You cannot lose at Derby, don't lose at Derby and don't lose 4-1 at Derby. It was a desperately long weekend. And we came back [on Monday] wanting to know what his response was because his response was the club's response. "He had calmed down a bit, obviously, [but] we were left in no doubt that this would never happen again, particularly at the Baseball Ground, and never again would you ever dream of going into a game at Derby and downing tools, which is what he thought we did. We were European champions at the time and he thought we had downed tools." With the spectre of Chelsea's power still probably haunting his side, O'Neill agrees that Saturday's tie will be "an x-ray of Villa's soul". The FA Cup offers a chance to make amends for their Carling Cup defeat against United. "Did Sir Alex Ferguson need another League Cup? Not at all. Did we need a League Cup? Yes we did, just to get this football club going again." If not this one, maybe another, because other top Premier League clubs will now think O'Neill is poachable. Aston Villa's Martin O'Neill: It is not in my nature to 'down tools' | Paul Hayward | Football | The Observer Hasn't O'Neill pulled this trick before: using his press chums to promote himself for bigger, better jobs? I, for one, pray he gets his 'marquee job' and that it plants him firmly down the East Lancs.
  17. He didn't play so I'm not sure which game Jamie was watching last year. He was just spouting Sky's line of 'ZOMG Liverpool is shit coz Rafa selled Alonso'. Not the brightest, our Jamie.
  18. Redknapp said he remembers how well Alonso linked up with Torres and Gerrard in this fixture last season. He's been prompted by producers to say something like that. That other rat bastard can fuck off as well.
  19. Redknapp said he remembers how well Alonso linked up with Torres and Gerrard in this fixture last season. He's been prompted by producers to say something like that. That other rat bastard can fuck off as well.
  20. I don't care for Tomkins' writing style and imagine the only reason he's a 'freelance writer' is that he's a piss-poor journalist. Shock horror.
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