Seven days of waiting for the next one.
It’s international week, and that means nothing worth talking about happens at all. Which means the media have got to find something to write about, and so they do, The usual players are going to the usual clubs and the most hilariously unrealistic says that Spurs are looking at Morgan Rogers. Insert your own ‘And I’m looking at…’ joke here.
We’ve engaged an American sports group, Klutch, to get us more sponsors. They’ll no doubt be expected to move our turnover up a gear.
Random stat time – we’re the most-fouled and non-penalty-awarded team in the Premier League. It’s not paranoia, oh no.
The squad members who aren’t otherwise engaged are headed to Spain for a few days training and a friendly against Eiche. If the stories are true they’ll be off to Hong Kong in a few months to play Bayern Munich. We’ll earn a few bob and we’ll win.
We had our first Saturday three o’clock of the season against Leeds and it was also the last; Spurs has been shifted to 12:30 and if/when we beat Bologna it will be moved again.
Jamal Jimoh-Aloba has been called into the England under-20s squad despite currently playing non-league. Well done him; now he can do the job we sent him out to do.
Youri Tielemans is in the Belgium squad, and supplies of cotton wool are running out.
Elche are seventeenth in La Liga and we looked on the way to a useful workout when the sadly predictable happens. Jadon Sancho is taken off with a shoulder injury and later seen with his arm in a sling, which is only to be expected for a player getting into form taking part in a friendly. They get an equaliser and then a winner in the last minute.
The death of former Villa forward Geoff Vowden has been announced. He was one of the players who helped us get out of the third division and was best known for scoring our first in the 48,110 game with Bournemouth.
If that’s not sad enough, we find out later that Alex Cropley has died. He truly was one of the greats of the 1976-77 team that paved the way for the team of the eighties. As was said, he taught Sid to walk, so that he could fly. He was also one of the unluckiest players of his era, suffering three leg breaks and a broken ankle. This isn’t the place to talk about one of them.
The Argentinian cultural attache to Aston described their 2-2 win over Mauritius as “It was one of the worst games we’ve played, even for a friendly.”
There are no Villa players in the England team against Uruguay, but there is one named Marcus Rashford who might be worth looking at and a C. Palmer, which is enough to send a shiver down the most stoic spine.
18,000-odd turn up at a rugby game at Villa Park, where work has begun on the new North Stand. We are, of course, only building it because of the PieintheSkyDome.
Igor Tudor gets sacked by Spurs. Unai is bound to be desperate to go there.
