Marked for Daniel Phillips
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad9 Jul 2035
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 20 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
Squad9 Jul 2035
“The easiest signature of my career.” Amadou Onana and Aston Villa agree another 2 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Squad9 Jul 2035
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aston Villa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad9 Jul 2035
Jassim Waazane gets the move he always wanted
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Jassim Waazane has just signed for Aston Villa, and for once the answer mattered.
Market9 Jul 2035
The bid was some way short and Aston Villa did not need long over it. Nobody in the game reads a first refusal as the end of anything.
Boardroom9 Jul 2035
The paperwork is done long before the player is. Yegor Mosin has agreed terms to come here when his current deal runs out, which means Aston Villa have spent a summer's transfer budget on a phone call.
Market9 Jul 2035
The phone has started ringing about Zion Suzuki again, and this time the name on the line is Brighton. Aston Villa are listening politely and promising nothing.
Market9 Jul 2035
Every dressing room knows how to read a signing like this one. Jassim Waazane is not here to sit and wait indefinitely, and the man whose place he has been bought to take knows it better than anyone.
Market9 Jul 2035
Every press conference now starts and ends the same way: with Boubacar Kamara’s future. The manager has run out of new ways to say nothing.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Boardroom2 Jul 2035
Paulo Tavares has until the next board meeting
What was said behind closed doors has now been said in front of a microphone. Everybody at Aston Villa can do the arithmetic, including the man it is aimed at.
Boardroom2 Jul 2035
The Aston Villa board call everybody in
Nothing has been announced and everybody understands what it means. A board that summons the whole football department on a Tuesday morning is a board that has stopped believing the problem will fix itself.
Squad2 Jul 2035
A fracture rules Steven Williams out for 28 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Aston Villa will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Squad2 Jul 2035
Matty Cash was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad2 Jul 2035
“The easiest signature of my career.” Amadou Onana and Aston Villa agree another 2 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Market2 Jul 2035
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Aston Villa is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Squad2 Jul 2035
Evann Guessand falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Market2 Jul 2035
Both sides expect a conversation in the coming days. Aston Villa will name a price, and everything after that is arithmetic.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Boardroom24 Jul 2034
The silence upstairs is getting loud at Aston Villa
Nobody on the board has said anything against the manager, which is the point — they have stopped saying anything for him either.
Squad24 Jul 2034
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aston Villa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad24 Jul 2034
Words at Aston Villa training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Matty Cash is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Squad3 Apr 2034
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 9 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Boardroom3 Apr 2034
Pressure builds in the Aston Villa boardroom
The directors have stopped offering the manager public warmth. In football that is usually the stage before the short statement.
Squad3 Apr 2034
“I was told what my role would be, and I signed on that basis. It has not happened.” A grievance with a date attached is the hardest kind to settle.
Squad3 Apr 2034
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aston Villa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad3 Apr 2034
Matty Cash falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Market3 Apr 2034
Only the photograph left for Zech Obiero
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Zech Obiero will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Aston Villa the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Match1 Apr 2034
Manchester City left with the points after a 0‑2 defeat that will take some explaining on the terraces.
Market3 Apr 2034
The Amadou Onana talk will not go away
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Aston Villa know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Boardroom3 Apr 2034
$13.5M taken back off the Aston Villa table
What was available in the summer has quietly gone. Upstairs nobody will call it a change of ambition; downstairs nobody will call it anything else.
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad5 Sep 2033
A knee injury of the worst kind for Mohamed Ben Fredj
67 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Aston Villa lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Player ratings5 Sep 2033
A brace, and James McAtee takes the afternoon — 8.17
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. James McAtee provided it, and the 8.17 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Squad5 Sep 2033
561 appearances across 13 seasons in these colours. Careers like that are not built any more, and Aston Villa know what they have.
Player ratings5 Sep 2033
Tammy Abraham, 35, rolls back the years — 7.96
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.96 at 35, and nobody on the pitch was better.
Market5 Sep 2033
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Aston Villa is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Market5 Sep 2033
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
Squad5 Sep 2033
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aston Villa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad5 Sep 2033
Matty Cash falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.