Transfer Gossip Dec 08

December 14, 2008 by Martin Banks
Filed under: Aston Villa, Transfer News

Transfer gossip You can hardly turn around now without bumping into a new rumour about a striker MON is going to buy in January. It’s great for a couple of reasons; firstly because it surely means that come January we will be signing at least one quality striker (hopefully it won’t turn out that every single rumour was true because then we’d have about a hundred!) and secondly because it shows how seriously the rest of the football world is finally taking Villa’s top four push.

We are currently fourth in the league, we are the third highest scoring team and we have scored seven goals in our last two league games… but still we feel we desperately need a striker and the rumour creators/spreaders seem to whole heartedly agree.

To all those, like myself, who continued to watch them every week through all the boring and draw ridden years; it’s a great time to be a Villa fan, enjoy every minute of it. And if there are any glory hunters out there who are now switching allegiance to us, well as much as I disagree with the concept of switching teams (your football team is like a tattoo, you pick it and then you’re bloody stuck with it!) it is a nice compliment that we are now one of the teams that people want to start watching and supporting. MON’s brand of exciting youthful football is good to watch, there’s no two ways about it.

So what was I talking about? Oh yeah, rumours…

England striker, Mr Gangly himself, Peter Crouch is reportedly on his way back to Villa Park. He’s played for a lot of teams our Crouchy has (9 in total if you include Tottenham Youths) and he is currently in his second spell at Portsmouth and rumoured to be coming for a second spell at the Villa. Perhaps he really likes moving house. Or he has a mate with a van and feels it would be a waste not to get the most out of him. Crouchy seems to suffer from an inability to convince his manager that he should be in the first team, spending much of his career sitting on various benches around the country, primarily ours and Liverpool’s (and probably park benches drinking White Lightning cider when he was 15!). This is the main reason I don’t think he’ll come to us, at Portsmouth he has a much better chance of regular football, whereas if he came to us there is no such guarantee.
Chances it’ll actually happen: Hmmm, it’s one of them… it might, but I doubt it. (Read more)
It’s been a long time since an Aston Villa player has been linked with a move to Real Madrid, but apparently Spurs reject Jaunde Ramos has asked his staff to keep tabs on the raw talent of Ashley Young. This one is really building speed and kicking up a fuss around the Villa blogs, but it’s probably just all pie-in-the-sky media lies. He’s certainly of enough quality for Madrid but I don’t see him leaving us when MON has given him the freedom and opportunity to become the player he is and he knows that with us he will play every match and will have the pride of being an integral part of anything we acheive.
Chances it’ll actually happen: It better not, but it’s all down to the size of his greed streak. (Read more)