royhendo

that's been copied off RAWK and it would be sweet as a nut if the lad that posted it there (Gedo) was making it up.

Cheers for the updates GW - brilliant stuff

Yeah, that's spot on. The scouts have taken a fair bit of clog aswell, haven't they? A few of the ideas in there were seriously challenged over the course of the season but that was the main one, you're right. Interesting that it was a massive part of the contract negotiations though, and now Segura's come in and McPartland's at the helm. The main worry is Rafa's appetite to play passing football really - the whole Alonso thing, and the reluctance to use Agger at times... and personally I got effed off with Kuyt for a long spell - still wish he was a squad player rather than our first choice wide right, you know? The defensive stuff seems to hold true, but sometimes you wonder what he's planning when we're linked with certain players.

Well, I reckon we tweened between 2 and 3 for much of the season, but we toiled to fit the bill on 3 and that was our problem - that's why we never won the league for me. We showed it a few times and we swep teams away in the process - 2nd half at Stamford Bridge, the ten minute spree at Goodison when we kept bulging the onion bag, Newcastle away... but the ball wasn't pinging around like a pinball enough of the time. Then we came to the crunch period near the end when we had to just go for it, and suddenly everything clicked into place didn't it? We were crushing all comers and we should have gubbed Arsenal at home too. It scares me to think we'd lose Xabi Alonso though - it'd be a big risk. If we manage to keep him and add two or three truly top quality footballers who can play it one touch and who work hard off the ball, then we could be on to something even scarier than we are now. We're close. s**** at set pieces at both ends though eh?

Cheers dudes. Been an interesting season eh? Turns out the signings the post was prompted by were largely duds, but we still got better. Just hope the first post-Parry summer is a clever one eh?

A lot of people have suggested we enter two reserve leagues like Man City do, which I think is a great idea. We should also make better use of the loan system I reckon. Regardless, here are some numbers (taken from a couple of months ago) to let people compare us with our rivals... It's not as much of a comparative problem as people think. overall squad numbers... First team squad numbers 36 - Arsenal, Man Utd 35 - Liverpool 30 - Man City 27 - Chelsea 23 - Villa Reserve players not listed in 1st team 21 - Villa 19 - Man City 18 - Liverpool 17 - Arsenal 13 - Chelsea 10 - Man Utd Total loanees (1st team and reserves) 11 - Liverpool 10 - Arsenal 9 - Chelsea 6 - Man Utd 3 - Man City 2 - Aston Villa Academy players not listed in reserves 27 - Aston Villa 25 - Man Utd 22 - Chelsea 19 - Liverpool 17 - Arsenal ? - Man City (details not listed) So - total player numbers for 1st team and reserves are as follows... 64 - Liverpool 63 - Arsenal 52 - Man Utd 52 - Man City 49 - Chelsea 46 - Aston Villa

double post, sorry...

Brilliant stuff - thanks for the insight mate. So in your view (we have 6 or 7 reserve level strikers alone) is the current set-up workable?The argument you always read is that training can't ever mirror competitive match conditions. Saying that, Rafa apparently likes high intensity and game conditions in training. What are your views on it mate?

Encouraging stuff... Are you coaching in Iceland then mate?

Gotta be Carrie surely ;D

Level 1 mate, level 1! But we escaped with our pants and our dignity intact... Poor show though and we need to keep the ball better

not as good as i feel about nemeth and ngog, that's for sure!

cheers mate - this is a great response for me. the acid test is how it plays out in practice. last season we heard a lot of talk about shifting the balance in attack but we didn't improve our conversion of chances that well in percentage terms (more on the actual numbers below). if we don't see real progress towards a 'play-making' style as described by RM this season - what I arbitrarily called Level 3 football - then I think we need to scratch our heads about it and figure out why. but i think we've already seen good signs in pre-season (although it's pre-season so we can't get ahead of ourselves). The Actim Premier League stats: http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11096_2705370,00.html If you take these (paste the table into Excel, for example) and divide goals scored by the number of attempts on goal we had (to figure out the percentage 'conversion ratio') we hit 12.52%. So for every 100 chances we create, on average, we score 12.52 goals. So in the Premier League, we had 535 attempts on goal (note that this is second only to Man United who had 547 attempts, and well ahead of Arsenal who had 473, and Chelsea who had 454). So we created a lot of chances - a tremendous number of chances. If we converted something like the percentage of chances our rivals did, the stats would be frightening. To put this in perspective, Man United scored most goals with 80, followed by Arsenal with 74, and then Villa with 71. We scored 67 - one more than Spurs, and two more than Chelsea. So how do we rate in our conversion of chances? Well, Villa were first with 17.57%. Arsenal were second with 15.64%. Man United came fifth with 14.63%. Meanwhile, we were 10th with 12.52%. If we upped our conversion ratio even to the average percentage of those above us, we'd hit roughly Man United's level at 14.65%. That would equate to 78 goals. If we upped our conversion ratio to Arsenal's level (15.64%), we'd up that to 83 goals. And if we topped the league in converting our chances by matching Villa's 17.57%, we'd score 94 goals. So clearly it's going to pay if we improve the quality of service, the creation of space and opportunities in the box, and how clinical we are in and around the box. I reckon Rafa's recruited with that in mind this year and the young lads are only going to improve it. But then there are no guarantees and it's something to keep an eye on to check we're making progress, isn't it?

really? I don't know if you mean the young lads coming through but technique is less and less of an issue