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@comment by Scribe (U3616)

Since when is the chubby Radio 1 DJ a Premier League manager?

fantasy.premierleague.com - ja606 league code free and open to anyone 31270-13990

Its the quality of that squad that impresses me and its the lack of quality in the current squad that scares the crap out of me. How many have we lost this summer nine or ten players??

Tactics. We were a good, indeed very good, counter-attacking side. That means the opposition have the ball a lot of the time, so you have to do a lot of chasing around, which takes its toll, both in individual matches and over a season, particularly if its the same players week after week. And it only works if the opposition keeps attacking; teams were learning to hang back against us, and we didn't have the creativity to counter that.

We failed because we didn't have enough depth. Take the strongest first eleven from that squad:

Friedel
L.Young Laursen Davies Bouma
Milner Petrov Barry A.Young
Agbonlahor Carew

Then these are our backup options:
Guzan, Knight, Cuellar, Shorey, Reo Coker, Sidwell, Salifou, Gardner, Delfouneso, Harewood.

With the possible exception of Reo Coker, those players are not good enough to cover for an injury to someone like Barry, Laursen or Agbonlahor. Davies and Luke Young are also weak links in the first eleven and probably only midtable players. The fact that Laursen and Bouma also got career ending injuries that season cut out numbers even further down and we had Knight playing defence and Cuellar at right back.

A couple of years back I had hoped we would go like Spurs and have really good attacking players like Kranjcar sitting on the bench. This may have happened under MON, although the sort of squad players he signed like Sidwell suggest he wasn't able to buy exceptionally good squad players like Harry can.

It's depressing to see that we're even weaker. Why do Villa always take one step forward and then two steps back? This will always be the case until we get a rich owner who gets in a manager who is trustworthy to get the most out of that money.

While I admit that MON did waste a lot of Lerner's money and this is why he is cutting back, it still makes me angry that he's doing this to the club and the fans. It was MON who spent the money on high wage players who weren't good enough, yet it's the fans who are being made to suffer.

we had the squad, the facilities, and even the tactics to get somewhere that season. but the the problem is if you just gonna play the same 14 players over and over and over again, then your gonna have problems around the January time of the season. which unfortunately, was always (and still would be) the case with martin o'neil. he just never seemed to have faith in some of the players he bought.

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If we'd had Bent in that squad we'd def had won silverware. We lacked a real goal poacher in the box at times and I think that was why we struggled later on in those seasons.