that sanchez is one of the worst players ive seen, feel bad for your players who actually tried when players like him are next to them.

Yh Carlos Sanchez is dreadful. Grealish and Traore (even if he has quite a bit to learn but insane talent) should be play more

Off topic, but do you have much to spend in Jan?

OK so the miracle didn't quite come off this time. Next time.

Expected exactly what we got - Nothing

Never watched as quite frankly I am fed up watching them, even Newcastle picking up points and they are dire, Villa are going down lets just be realistic

You guys didn't honestly expect anything from a game v Arsenal, did you?

Was you expecting to beat them?

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Paddy

Be careful of what you wish for. Beyond the championship there's League 1

Lets just clear pretty much all of the first team out !! Most will leave anyway hopefully and there are very few i would miss. Lets face it we ARE going down this year and i would personally like to see a total clearout. Players like Grealish and Gil, Richards are not going to play in the Championship. We need to start again as a club, there is a certain poison going through us at the moment which needs to be downed.

Trouble is, who do you replace them with? Who is better than what we've got who'd be interested in playing in the Championship?

I'd stick with the best players that we've got who are willing to stay. I'm afraid the poison isn't with the players. It's coming from a well-intentioned but clueless owner who hasn't the money to finance the club in the way it needs. Until we get a new owner who has a clear vision and intent as regards the club we will have huge problems, whether we're in the PL or the Championship.

And I'm fed up with starting again. We've done it every year for the last four years. What we need out of this year is to form a hard core of players around which things can be built in future years. By the end of this season the players will have far more experience and we should try to retain the best for the future. Some of our signings clearly have talent; by the end of this season we should know which ones can deliver it.

To be honest I agree with Paddy. Some Villa fans might say I'm not a proper fan for saying this, but dropping down into the Championship to see us actually win some football matches is not such a bad thing. Until Lerner and the moronic staff he's appointed go, we're going nowhere anyway. They seem happy for us to just finish 17th every season.

I don't blame Garde at all if we go down. Think Moyes would have been a better appointment for a club in our situation, but we can't change that now. There are some good players at our club, but they are totally devoid of confidence and morale is at rock bottom

I just hope if we go down we can do a Newcastle, rebuild our confidence and come straight back up again. We've seen what can happen when teams from the Championship get promoted and carry that good form into the Premier League.

I just hope we can do the same...

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You are all correct to say that we are almost certainly down but it won't be a good thing. You can't tell how long it will take to come up. There are a lot of decent sides in the championship and in any case you don't have to go down to rebuild. Much better to stay up, you can still have a clear out.

As I see it, the next 4 matches are our last remaining hope. We play 3 of the teams nearest to us plus West Ham. If we don't win 2 of those, then we can start planning for the Championship.

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You have a point. I was astonished when Sherwood said after the cup final his players were losers, and he'd just told them so, and they were to go. He lapsed into the "losers" them several times this season. Didn't seem to occur to him the responsibility was his. Looking back, Sherwood did a good job motivating the players for a final push which just got us home last season, but that was it. The rot set in after the thrashing by Southampton last season; we've won only one match and drawn one in the PL since. Too many players have been pushed out. At least Garde has the sense to play Bacuna at LB rather than Richardson. But Cissokho or Bennett would have been better than Richardson.

Its ridiculous to say we are not as good as Arsenal and so we should be in the Championship. The real question is why are we so far behind teams like Leicester, Palace, Watford and West Ham in terms of points. I don't have the answer but its not money. I think we probably spent more than these teams not just in the summer but over the last 2 or 3 years?

Exactly. Why are Leicester, Palace, Watford, West Ham, Southampton, Swansea (know they're going through a blip at the moment), all better than us. We're one of the biggest clubs in the country, supposed to have some of the best training facilities in the country, and one of the best academies. But almost none of our young players can make the step up into the first team. Grealish has done nothing to justify the hype.

I guess Newcastle and Sunderland fans probably say the same thing though...

I often think how things might have been had Lerner appointed Houllier, or possibly Garde, instead of O'Neill.

Maybe we would have had a better transfer policy and been much better off in the long term. O'Neill bought a few good players, but for every good one, he bought 2-3 shockers.

And he got out at exactly the right time.

I think our problems can be traced right back to when Lerner started (buying average players on inflated wages). We didn't realise what was going on behind the scenes until later on as we had 2-3 seasons of short term success in the beginning.

It often goes in cycles. Leicester could easily have been relegated last season, Palace needed Pardue to drag them up the PL, West Ham went through an appalling patch and needed Big Sam to get themselves promoted. Southampton and Swansea are different because they've benefited from years of single-minded direction from the top, in Swansea's case taking them from League 2 to the PL. Southampton had a great academy; not sure if they still have as they sacked the staff a couple of year's ago. Swansea's problems are very simple. Their recent successes have been built on having an outstanding striker; they sold Bony and didn't buy a replacement (sound familiar?), Gomez isn't the answer, and Monk was the scapegoat and not the cause. Watford I don't understand; with the changes of players and managers they shouldn't be so successful.

MON in his way is a good manager, but his approach is dated; he wasn't one for the long term. Houllier was probably the best prospect but for his health. The MON/Lerner problem was that if you bought experienced British players then you paid over the odds, then and now.

Our academy and U21s went downhill a few seasons ago, probably after Kevin Mac left. Maybe he can drag them back up. Those players now out on loan I don't think will make it, at least not here. But the thing which gets me annoyed is DJ never getting a chance; a cracking player, now Preston's top scorer.

It is really sad what has happened to Villa, they have just disintegrated year after year after year and no one has stepped in to stop the rot setting in and what is now an inevitable relegation without any fight or care from any of the players. Odds of 1/8 and 1/12 to go down says it all.

Lots of ifs and buts, but agree that this stems from O'Neill. He did turn us into a top six side for a few years admittedly, but our problems go back to him: a higher wage bill than Spurs in 2010 when they got into the CL, despite Spurs having a far better squad of players than us; too many players signed who were just not good enough; leaving when the going got tough despite it being his team and squad and his playing style had become the identity of the club's success. O'Neill had ambition and drive and pushed the team to succeed, but ultimately overachieved with the players he had and didn't buy players of the calibre that a new manager could do anything with (hence why Houllier wanted rid of the likes of Gabby, Dunne, Collins, Warnock, Reo Coker etc). He did leave us with Young, Downing, Petrov and Friedel - good players - but once they moved on we were ****ed as none of the other players were any good and able to step up. Oh, and O'Neill did sign Delph I guess.

Generally, though, the problems started after Houllier had to step down. He had a real football brain and knew what was needed to get Villa as true challengers to the European places for the long term, playing possession football and having quality throughout the squad, but he never was able to implement his long term vision on the club. After that every manager was a disaster - Macleish, Lambert (talented manager when we got him but not backed enough with money), Sherwood. Now we have Garde who is quite possibly a talented manager but cannot get his vision across to this current squad of substandard players.

What the Championship will do to Villa who knows. I hope we can convince some of our better players to play there - Ayew, Richards, Gil, Traore, Okore. Unfortunately, they may move on if another PL club realises they have footballing talent (hopefully no one will have noticed).

Real sad to see Villa go the way they have. Obviously I'm biased but this club should have gone the way City did - we had the history, the stadium, the fanbase, the biggest team in the Midlands. Why no one with any ambition wanted to take Villa forward I'll never know, Lerner has to be without doubt the worst owner in PL history with what he's done to Villa on his watch.

Newcastle, Norwich, Sunderland

we need at least 7 pts from these 3 games to have any hope, anything less then its all over imo

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thats the thing, they dont, maybe one or two but on paper pretty even

We wont win another game !!