Alone in the Park - it's the Prem 2020-21 thread

Looks like Varane to Utd is more or less wrapped up

Add a midfielder and that's a pretty decent summer

Breaking: Manchester City make £100million offer for Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish https://t.co/RmJaa5Ey0D

— John Percy (@JPercyTelegraph) July 30, 2021

Oof, Percy usually knows what he's talking about, gotta think that's it

The transfer has felt inevitable for some time but this will still break my heart a bit

Yeah there's a lot of rage on Villa Twitter at the moment but it seems more sadly inevitable now. Easy for me to say but I think Grealish has been as loyal as any player would be in the moneyball era

Not enough money imo

he'll obviously be good for them...but does he really suit Pep's system?

Messi aside, I can really think of a player like him who's thrived for a Guardiola team. Take someone like Bernardo Silva, who was a genuinely thrilling dribbler at Monaco but got turned into more of a hard-working cog once he moved to City

Pretty sure Grealish has the work ethic for that tbh, tho I doubted the necessity of him + Kane at one point. Centre Forward is the more pressing necessity for City obv

He’ll be amazing for them imo, he’s just too good not to be. the theoretical stuff about whether he’s well suited for a Guardiola team will fade into the background when he actually starts playing.

it’s always a bit of a mug’s game trying to argue over whether a particular player is “better” than another, you’re usually comparing apples and oranges and there’s too much room for semantic misunderstandings, wilful or accidental.

But I don’t really recall seeing anyone other than a few of the absolute elite able to do what he can do with a football, he may not be “better” but he is different and he is extraordinary and tbh there is a twisted part of me that kind of wants him to make the move and go to that level and show the idiot doubters what he’s capable of

Anyway don’t mind me I’ll just be over here weeping into my pillow

Also darragh otm re: price but truthfully he is priceless to Villa and if there is any truth to the rumours that £100m was the figure he and the board shook hands on last summer then fair enough really

Scumbag villa fans being negative about Grealish on social media can do one frankly, whether he stays or goes he is an eternal Villa icon and I hope he wins the trophies he’s after

Otm

Yeah.

I’m currently quite invested in Villa doing well (mostly because of the minuscule run-off of the Ollie Watkins add-ons that my lot get if he keeps doing the business and he needs Villa to be doing well, not a player to shine in a mis-firing team IMO) and as a result hope this works out for the best.

Sometimes a player as stand-out as Grealish can unbalance a team but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Grealish in the Villa team (does it?). I wonder why.

Possibly because he predates the rest of our 11 and has obviously been the future of the club since he broke into the team at age 19 or whatever it was. this team has been built around him and presumably at least to some extent the question when scouting talent has been “how would this player gel with Jack?”

With that said, and acknowledging that his sale would be a tremendous setback (lol such an inadequate way to describe the heart being ripped out of the club) I would still have pretty high hopes for villa over the next few years. For the money involved I don’t think we could’ve done much better than Buendia as a replacement for Grealish’s creativity and if the owners continue to be as willing as they have been to throw their financial weight around then the trajectory continues to look pretty good, certainly compared to a team like idk Everton, who are having a dreadful summer

Partly why I think villa fans being babies about city buying success need to check themselves, even more so than keeping Grealish the key to Villa’s future success lies in our owners continuing to stump up for sensible but exciting signings every summer

My main take is that I'm incredibly bored of City

Well yeah there is that of course. Does seem greedy to be signing Grealish when you’ve already got Foden, Sterling, Mahrez, Silva, Torres etc but what are you gonna do

I do sympathise to an extent with the Villa fans bemoaning this as the absolute death knell for any team outside the top tier really challenging for those positions ever again but that ship sailed a long time ago

Villa reportedly bid 25m for James Ward-Prowse. Personally I find this (and our similarly risible pursuit of Emile Smith-Rowe) pretty hilarious but I’m not entirely clear what the strategy is

I think quite a lot of villa fans stuck the house on him staying because they couldn't countenance that he would ever want to leave or that our owners plans to spend their way to the top aren't guaranteed to work. But yeah tearing into journalists and city fans with the "bookmarking this so I can troll you when he signs a new deal 🤣" stuff, it's just so hapless and tragic, why do they do it to themselves

The Villatalk thread on Grealish was started by his brother in 2010 ;_;

There is an argument in the first few pages where someone says they think he may even grow up to be as good as...Adam Johnson and everyone is like "fuck off no he won't he's only 14 anyway"

lol

Oh yeah, no sympathy with Villa fans. Scott Parker fucked off when we were 4th at Christmas. Grealish stayed when you went down

I mean, he wouldn't have stayed if Spurs' opening bid hadn't been £3 million and Josh Onomah

FC Jude Bellingham of Birmingham retired JB's shirt when he left after making 41 senior appearances for them and their fans go on about him as if he still plays for them when he gets on for England. I am optimistic that Villa fans will avoid this undignified trap by simply immediately killing and eating Grealish as soon as they find out he's definitely leaving

Honestly, some of the shit being flung today about what a base act of treachery it would be to abandon the Villa project now, just when we’re on the cusp of qualifying for the uefa conference league (barring injury or accident of course), it’s simply amazing

Should all have their YouTube accounts flagged so they can never watch this video ever again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xId_x0WdB3I

JG languishing in the championship for three years was not ideal but the above hilarity and the succession of ridiculous worldies he scored were a tonic

I defer to the villa lads who have more knowledge about grealish than me, but I had the impression that transition dribbling is one of his greatest assets which might be less in evidence at city in comparison to villa. more likely to face packed defences in a smaller playing area, tho against that he'll also be the focus of less opposition attention and be playing with better players.

in other news I always had a lowish opinion about jonjoe shelvey but I never would have suspected he was a cat killer.

lol!

really excited to see leon bailey at villa. was an explosively good dribbler at leverkusen but did seem to have a great month followed by 2 bad ones.

Confirmed. Harry Kane has NOT shown up for Tottenham training, as @skysportspaulg revealed. Been told it’s Harry Kane choice and not related to Covid test. ⚪️ #THFC

Kane is assuming that he has had a ‘gentlemen agreement’ with the club since one year to leave Spurs this summer.

— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) August 2, 2021

gentlemans agreement is such a laughable and desperate term

Not presumably a gentleman's agreement to leave for 2/3rds of his market price though

Romero deal looks positive - Spurs not messing about over asking price and the player apparently favouring the move over Barcelona according to Fabrizio Romano.

Barca were never in because they cant afford what they have and spurs have been ducking around for weeks when the price was known

Levy is a small time cunt by choice and kane should be let execute him in the new stadium befote he leaves

Cristian Romero will fly to England to join Tottenham within the next 48 hours, once paperworks will be signed. Done deal after Atalanta accepted €55m bid 🇦🇷🛫 #THFC

Romero pushed a lot as he only wanted Tottenham. Barça, never in the race. Caleta-Car for Spurs, fake news. 🔴

— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) August 3, 2021

In Nuno We Trust

Its nuno yr business anymore

If I
wanna buy a keeper
and sell him on the weekend
it's

i'm confused i thought Lukaku was shit

he is and he isn't

mercurial

In the right setup

Grealish to City for £100m seems to be on. Kind of hard to see them spending £250m on two players in a window.

Also hard to see anyone else spending £150m on Kane. I suspect he might be stuck at Spurs.

play to lukaku's strengths, mainly his strength and he's a powerhouse of a centre forward, he folded many centrehalfs in two before slamming home last season, at inter, Conte knew how to play him

hopefully he turns into a donkey who can't finish

Would be pretty funny if Spurs refusing to contemplate selling Kane to Chelsea led them to buy Lukaku, which in turn led to Inter buying Vlahovic, who Spurs are apparently looking at as a replacement for Kane…

Lewandowski's longevity and real falling apart has rather spoiled the market for kane imo

Funny season for him to have done this tbh, next year was always a sweeter pitch imo

Kane spends another day in Florida to effectively rule himself out of Tottenham's Premier League opener against Manchester City, who will focus their attention on him after completing Grealish transfer #thfc #mcfc https://t.co/hpuvEULPo2

— Matt Law (@Matt_Law_DT) August 4, 2021

I didn’t realise until today that Kane’s agent is his brother, rather than an actual professional, which explains a huge amount.

Ings has gone to Villa.

I'm sure Kane's brother is a well-respected professional who's more than capable of handling a transfer of this magnitude

https://imgresizer.eurosport.com/unsafe/1200x0/filters:format(jpeg):focal(1473x289:1475x287)/origin-imgresizer.eurosport.com/2021/08/03/3193050-65416268-2560-1440.jpg

he's got a tie and everything