logo
'A season of missed opportunities'

'A season of missed opportunities'

BBC News29-05-2025

We asked for your views on our fan contributor David Michael's end of season scorecard (27 May, 15:58 BST).Here are some of your comments:Tony: Absolutely agree with this assessment. We've played some brilliant football - home to Newcastle, for example - some of the best play I've seen in over 57 years at Villa Park. Yet we then don't turn up in crunch games, and I don't get it. Next season will be trepidation about possibly falling back from what we achieved over the past three seasons. Nervous!Robert: I give this season a 7/10. While we can take Villa seriously as regular European contenders now, there's more work to do before we're regulars in the Champions League. Our season will be defined by the number of times we've had to get a result from a losing position, but it could've been different if we'd avoided individual defensive mistakes that led to goals conceded or, in the case of the last day, getting our goalkeeper sent off. Champions League regulars are strict on players who make mistakes at that level, and if Villa aspire to become one of them in years to come, that's the mentality we need to adopt.Tim: My old chap watched Villa with my grandad through the 50s and 60s. He always said, even then, that Villa didn't score enough goals. It's the same this season, our goals-for column is too low. That said, we shipped a lot too. Liam Delap would be a good start at correcting that imbalance.Prit: Season rating - 7/10. Could have easily been 9/10 but two pivotal games, against Crystal Palace and Manchester United, when the team froze and cost us dearly has lost a lot of goodwill. Our unsung hero has to be Boubacar Kamara. Midfield dynamo who can play across midfield, got us out of a lot of trouble by playing in the back four when we were desperate and is now scoring goals. Kamara is very much the glue that has held Villa together this season.Russell: The season has been one of missed opportunities. Seeing Newcastle and Palace win trophies, something we haven't managed since 1996, makes me very envious. Missing out on the Champions League in the way we did also sticks in the craw. Overall 7/10.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Emi Martinez 'pushing for Man Utd move' after Andrea Onana update
Emi Martinez 'pushing for Man Utd move' after Andrea Onana update

Daily Mirror

timean hour ago

  • Daily Mirror

Emi Martinez 'pushing for Man Utd move' after Andrea Onana update

Emiliano Martinez continues to be linked with a move to Manchester United whilst Marcus Rashford is ready to return to his boyhood club despite his issues with Ruben Amorim Manchester United's summer has made a lot of noise but so far the only major transfer to take place in the arrival of Matheus Cunha - who joined from Wolves for just over £60million. The Red Devils remain on the hunt for more firepower but look as if they could miss out on Viktor Gyokeres, who would prefer to head elsewhere. The club are keen on Bryan Mbeumo but have had offers rejected as Brentford hold out for their hefty asking price. ‌ A new goalkeeper could also be on Ruben Amorim 's radar after seeing Andre Onana make a number of notable errors. He has been linked with the exit door despite having a desire to prove he can cut in at Old Trafford. ‌ Replacements have been eyed though with World Cup winner Emiliano Martinez cited as a possible summer target. His future has been the subject of speculation, even if Aston Villa boss Unai Emery has dismissed any suggestion he could leave. Here's the latest transfer rumours from the red side of Manchester. Martinez holding out for move Martinez is already sold on the idea of joining United this summer and is said to have rebuffed offers from 'big-hitters' in the hope of pushing through a dream switch to Old Trafford. There has been speculation that Martinez could move on with Villa potentially needing to sell in order to meet Profit and Sustainability Rules. The Sun now claims that Martinez is 'desperate' to push through a move to United despite the fact that the Red Devils are coming off the back of their worst ever Premier League campaign. And it's even been suggested that the Villa star has ignored offers from other top clubs in order to remain available for United. A source told the publication: 'Emi is big pals with Argentina team-mate Lisandro Martinez and is keen to move. He has already knocked back a couple of big hitters in the hope of joining United. Rashford's return plan Marcus Rashford is planning to return to training with United next month if a deal for him to leave the club hasn't been agreed, according to ESPN. The forward spent the last six months out on loan at Aston Villa after being frozen out under Amorim. ‌ No bids have yet been received despite well documented interest in Rashford and, as things stand, the 27-year-old will report back to Carrington to begin his pre-season preparations. It is understood that Amorim is yet to make a decision about whether Rashford and a number of the other fringe players will join the team on their summer tour to the United States. Antony, Alejandro Garnacho or Jadon Sancho all face uncertain futures and may not been included. ‌ Monaco eye two Prem keepers - including Onana Monaco are torn between pursing two Premier League goalkeepers but could yet offer Andre Onana a route out of Manchester after two difficult years. French outlet L'Equipe have claimed that Monaco are looking to add a new shotstopper to their squad. They want to upgrade their current options with Radoslaw Madecki and Philipp Kohn currently on their books. Onana is one player who has been shortlisted along with Chelsea's Djordje Petrovic. Onana has remained the No 1 at Old Trafford, albeit he was dropped briefly last term, whilst Petrovic has slipped down the pecking order at Stamford Bridge as Robert Sanchez established himself as first choice. Join our new WhatsApp community and receive your daily dose of Mirror Football content. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice.

MPs treated HS2 as a test of virility. No wonder it's been a flop
MPs treated HS2 as a test of virility. No wonder it's been a flop

Times

timean hour ago

  • Times

MPs treated HS2 as a test of virility. No wonder it's been a flop

L ast week brought shocking news. HS2, the nation's flagship infrastructure project, will be further delayed. A damning report found that the project has been comprehensively mismanaged, and needs to be completely reset to stop costs ballooning further. The secretary of state blasted the appalling failures to date, but promised that Whitehall would now finally get a grip. Well, I say shocking news. At this point such stories are as traditional a part of the news calendar as the Boat Race. HS2 has become the fiasco of fiascos, the disaster of disasters, a painfully on-the-nose metaphor for a country that can't get anything built, or anything done. Yet it might all have been so different. In 2005 Alistair Darling commissioned Sir Rod Eddington, former head of British Airways, to review the transport network. Eddington argued for expanding our big international gateways, such as Heathrow and the container ports; upgrading the roads, by introducing pay-as-you-go pricing; fixing our godawful planning system; and tackling the worst pinch points, not least the commuter routes into the big cities. But he warned that many of the proposals for high-speed rail were solutions looking for a problem — boys wanting to play with toys.

Surely there are better steps to growth than 600 million shoes
Surely there are better steps to growth than 600 million shoes

Times

timean hour ago

  • Times

Surely there are better steps to growth than 600 million shoes

Terrible news: Britain is doomed to have a puny economic growth rate of about 1 per cent, the CBI said last week. This is just not enough and we should all be very worried about it. But — and I'm probably being a bit slow here — why? I looked up 'economic growth' in the dictionary, and it turns out to mean 'an increase in the amount of goods and services produced'. And then I looked around my house and thought: hang on. Don't we have too much stuff already? I'm a stingy git and don't buy much but, somehow, every room is packed with things I neither want nor need. The pot on my desk holds 23 pens, 22 of which I do not use. The bookshelves hold more books than I have time to count, most of which I have no recollection of reading. The cellar is packed with unused tools, the wardrobe with unworn clothes. It's not just me. There are 1.6 billion items of unworn clothing in British wardrobes, according to the charity Wrap — and despite that, we're expected to buy 61 garments each in 2025. More than 300 million pairs of shoes are sold in the UK every year, despite us having only 69 million pairs of feet. The average child has 238 toys, of which they use about 10 per cent. Between them, our 28 million households buy eight million new TVs a year. You get the point. Yes, some people still have too little: but most of us have stuff coming out of our ears. This is why you can use all those TVs you own to watch an entire genre of programmes dedicated to 'decluttering', so that in between the ads for more stuff to buy, Nick Knowles or Marie Kondo can tell you how to throw out all the stuff you've already bought. Stacey Solomon has one of these shows on the BBC; the other day she was talking to a very nice, normal family who had 87 board games, 358 plastic dolls and 106 animal ornaments. It was horrifying. The correct number of animal ornaments in any given household is zero. The economists say that the NHS will collapse and zombies will roam the land if we don't go on acquiring all these things at an ever-increasing rate and then, when our houses are full up, invite Stacey over to help us throw it all out and start again. This seems an odd and impractical arrangement. Swathes of the country are landfill as it is, and the rest is strewn with fly-tipped old fridges and repulsive mattresses. • CBI warns of triple whammy on slow economic growth What about the services bit of that definition, then? Perhaps we just need more of those? Our biggest industry in that department is financial services, and I'm not certain having twice as many adverts for banks and life insurance will make the nation better off in any meaningful sense. The rest of the sector is mainly pizza and fried chicken, and you've only got to look up and down your street to see there are too many of those. In the 1930s, hunger-related diseases were widespread in the UK. Now obesity causes 30,000 deaths a year. Seems like we're growing, even if the economy isn't. Not that we actually eat all of the food we buy. Back in Merrie England, your average peasant's hovel didn't throw out anything at all except the occasional plague-ridden corpse. Now the UK generates about 10 million tonnes of food waste annually. Earlier this year I had a bash at being a binman on a Coventry council estate. It wasn't an affluent area, but we were tipping weighty wheelie bins full of uneaten leftovers into the truck. I don't want to go back to Merrie England, or the 1930s. On balance, obesity is probably better than starvation. But somewhere along the line there must have been an ideal point between shortage and excess, between a population that staged mass hunger marches and a population that couldn't be arsed to haul its blubbery bulk off the sofa and waddle along to McDonald's, so ordered a Deliveroo instead. My guess is that we cruised blithely past that point without noticing, perhaps some time around 1991. A halcyon, elusive moment when we had enough to eat, but not too much; where we could replace things when they were worn out, but didn't buy loads more of them for the sake of it; where we could embrace useful innovations, but didn't 'upgrade' constantly just because an advert told us we should. I know, I sound like some green weirdo who wants us all to eat nothing but mung beans and get our power from burning the resultant methane-rich flatulence. I really don't. Thanks to the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we live in a world with anaesthetics, fish fingers and Netflix, and we can stay breathing to enjoy them for twice as long as we used to. I'm grateful for that. Still, I find it puzzling to be told that, to maintain this state of affairs, we need to buy ever-increasing quantities of stuff of all descriptions: clothes that won't be worn, gadgets that won't be used, dubious vitamin supplements, pointless scented candles, bloodthirsty video games. None of it seems to be making us much happier. What's the answer? No idea. It's got to lie somewhere between the 'buy, buy, buy' unfettered free market nutters and the 'scrimp, scrimp, scrimp' eco-loons who think we can live like hobbits in some pre-industrial Shire, shunning modernity and living off nothing but our own postcolonial guilt. An arrangement where we buy what we really need, and those things are made to last by people who are paid a decent wage for doing so. But it does seem to be awfully hard to organise. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry too much about the growth figures. I'm going to clear out the cellar instead.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store