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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Buendia + 57 Varieties But At Villa There Are None

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Bit of a puzzle for Aston Villa fans this, what has happened with Emi Buendia?

I spoke with our Vital Norwich editor as the rumours moved towards a ‘done deal’ on buying their star last summer. He waxed lyrical about the player and I know Canaries fans were gutted losing him.

Tuckster said: “Better Player Than Maddison.” Aston Villa Are Signing A Potential World Class Star, adding: “Losing Buendia is going to be horrible for the Canary nation. He is quite simply an awesome footballer.”

“Well, I would say (this is a big claim) that Buendia is a better player than James Maddison at this time. Maddison is an excellent number 10, who scores cracking goals, free kicks and provides assists by the hatful. Buendia does nearly all of that, although his set-pieces aren’t at Maddison’s level, with added work-rate and steel. The boy loves a tackle and he will track back all game long to win the ball back.

His technical ability, coupled with his low centre of gravity, vision and strength, made him unplayable at times in the Championship for Norwich, leaving opponents no choice but to kick him to try to wind him up and stop him. He has a stereotypical “Latin” temperament and that has seen him shown a few red cards in the past. This last season though has seen him mature on that front, often just getting up and trotting away, like Lionel Messi does in the same sorts of situations, he just gets on with it now.”

Seems a long time ago this sort of talk doesn’t it?!

For us, he has looked a shadow of the player that was so lorded at Norwich City, not only in touches and goals, but also in energy and effort.

Liam and myself discuss the current situation in our latest podcast.

Forum thread on Emi: click here…

As Platypus said:

Can you imagine coming into the chaos of our pre-season, early season, injury, international breaks, up a league, poor team form and now a managerial change? I surprised you’re all surprised. If there was ever a set of conditions for you to not hit the ground running then this ticks all the boxes.

That doesn’t mean he’s shown enough, or that he’ll definitely smash it, but I think some patience is due on our part. He’s shown glimpses of real class but needs to click with those around him and get his looseness back. Same can be said for most of our attacking players.

And I added:

I still have massively high hopes, however, performances like yesterday can’t be tolerated, not by this manager, not by the fans, and hopefully not by the player himself.

I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t come good, you don’t just become a poor player, just you go through a poor run of form.

Fingers crossed, now Steven Gerrard is in place, he can get this sorted, there is an excellent player in there somewhere, we’ve yet to see it consistently, but when we do, things should be good. He simply has to improve, we can’t have our record signing not doing the business for us.

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