Blimey, I’ve nailed my colours to the mast there, haven’t I? But the fact is, it is what I think. That’s done for that, then, knowing my predictions.
Legia beat us 3-2 on their turf and we really weren’t very good. Their crowd helped them massively but they aren’t going to have that today and our home form is seriously better anyway.
Straight into squad news and it’s all good for us, with only Mings and Buendia out.
Given that Ramsey made an appearance against Spurs, you’d expect him to start and I’d also expect Moreno to get minutes too, if things are going our way.
Duran no doubt takes Watkins’ place and if so, I’d take that as a sign that he is still firmly in the picture.
Tielemans has done well recently, so he’ll probably start too.
Otherwise, I’m going to assume Emery’s learned his lesson about ripping the team to pieces and he won’t change too much from the off and swap things out when the game is won.
Three changes then, but they’re more reasoned, I’d suggest and not like throwing Chambers and Dendoncker in, when they haven’t played for a while or demonstrated any form.
As for Legia, I’m seriously struggling to get news about them and that’s a bit disappointing, in that it seems they’re not given much respect over here.
Villa are 1/4 to win this and I’d guess that’s about right.
So while I’m not counting my chickens, I’m fairly confident we will win it.
We need to win it by two clear goals to come out as group winners, I believe and I firmly believe we’ll achieve that too.
No more messing about, let’s just do this. Then we can play all sorts in game 6, which is against Zrinjski Mostar.
I’m going for 3-1, because we’re always likely to concede. But I’m hoping it will be more.
1-1 it is then, knowing the Villa.
UTV!
Club statement following last nights violence where Villa have lodged a formal complaint relating to the behaviour of Legia Warsaw and their fans.
https://www.avfc.co.uk/news/2023/december/01/club-statement/
According to the media Warsaw, having taken the allocation of tickets, then failed to distribute them to supporters – on my view a deliberate act calculated to cause a violent reaction.
If true then Warsaw should be kicked out of the competition and AZ awarded second spot based on current standings.
If they haven’t cooperated with UEFA, they’ll be sanctioned without a doubt.
That’s just inexcusable and I agree, they should be kicked out.
Test. Badger it’s saying token not found on my iphone wrote two blogs to OLL
This is my tablet
Cheers Bill. I’m trying things to see if I can stop the site misbehaving.
Seems Ollie is a doubt for Sunday – may be on the bench but possibly not starting.
That will give us some issues going forward. At least Ramsey’s back in the squad which will be important if Watkins isn’t fit. Interestingly I read that the Italian national coach thinks Zaniolo will develop into a top CF – maybe Unai will take a look Sunday.
He might want to score a goal first…
It’s only supposed to be a slight problem, so hopefully it will just be the one game.
At least it’s probably the best one to miss, as much as it might be a banana skin.
Is the site working Badger? No new posts have appeared since your tests, and a couple of pages of comments seem to have disappeared…
The pages haven’t disappeared.
It was re-paging after 12 replies, which I think is too short and is a change that I never made. It’s been 20 replies to a page for ages, so I just changed that back.
Something is altering things somewhere. The site’s not being hacked, because it’s protected like crazy, but I can’t work out what’s causing it.
There should be a “comment author cookie” being set, which is what remembers your email and username. I can’t even get that to work, even though I’ve checked the settings over and over.
Frustrating isn’t the word.
It should be working.
Let’s see if this posts.
I’ve re-enabled everything.
I’m getting sick of this and contemplating going to a whole new platform.
I see we have an easy draw , I don’t think so this will test Horseface
Serbia v England: June 16,
Gelsenkirchen
Denmark v England: June 20, Frankfurt
England v Slovenia: June 25, Cologne
Well done Badger
I don’t know what I’ve done apart from turn everything back on, lol.
Seems like it’s okay atm though. Fingers crossed.
No easy games at this stage and I’m sure Horseface will do his best to make it look incredibly difficult.
On paper it’s not the worst deaw, but I can see England may have a problem against Serbia – they’re like Croatia ans the other ex-Yogaslav sides, can be very skilfull and know all the tricks.
Something weird about the club statement about Legia Warsaw.
Usually the away club in Europe is told how many tickets they will get, and that number is printed straight away. The tickets can be sent to the Away club’s stadium before a decision is taken about whether the Away club will accept the allocation. If they reject it, the tickets are binned or returned.
Away fans do not have to travel, uncertain of whether they will get a ticket or not. Clearly in this case Legia fans travelled without knowing how many tickets in total was the allocation and whether they would get a ticket. So about 3000 turned up and only 1000 were going to get in if the tickets had been distributed. That was a recipe for disaster. Were Legia hoping to blackmail Villa and WM police into a larger allocation? If so they don’t know how bloody minded WM police can be.
Reminds me of Chico Marx.
“Monday we go to the ball game, he fool us – he no show up.
Tuesday he goes to the ball game, we fool him – we no show up.
Wednesday it’s a double-header, nobody show up.”
Ah, the Marx bros. I used to love them. I actually put one of their films on a few months back.
Yes, I find that a bit strange too.
They knew they had been limited to 1002 tickets. So why didn’t they accept the allocation weeks ago?
Is the fact that they have to offically accept the allocation on matchday some sort of formality thing? (that’s probably done so a few fatcat officials have to attend and get treated as VIPs and given all the royal treatment).
It seems a ridiculous state of affairs to me.
OLL, I replied twice and for some reason it failed to show , the response was to your comment on Rotterdam. I travelled with the Villa staff that day and had some stewards with me plus under cover police officers, in that match we was in what I called cattle pens next to the home supporters which sparked off a confrontation caused by home fans throwing bottles at us. Their police decided it was Villa fans playing up, far from the truth, police came in with battens hitting anyone near them . I told my stewards to get down in front and hold back our fans. That must have confused their police because they held back . On reading reports about our fan’s behaviour it stated they was well behaved that day. We had followed Man Utd, Liverpool who was reported as being English animals. I’m wondering if you was with us that day .
Bill, my comment was about the game in the last 8, Dynamo Kiev 0 Aston Villa 3 played in Sinferopol, Crimea. not about Rotterdam.
I next went to Brussels for the Anderlecht game. You might remember the fireworks rockets fired by the home fans, one hitting the girlfriend of a BAOR soldier, who jumped onto the pitch into the home pen and beat the **** out of the rocketeer. Earlier I was grabbed by then Club Sec Sue Walker(?) to translate what she was saying about fewer tickets available than booked. Both Sue & I ended up in the press box as our entry tickets had gone to others.
But I did go to Rotterdam, again on the team plane from Birmingham, and of course there weren’t home fans. Our opponents were Bayern. I remember the fans football match in town square and I saw no trouble at the stadium.