A mate of mine is a Villa fan and he is always getting angry at other friends who support Spurs or Arsenal or other teams with fans who complain all the time about only being in Europe, challenging for the top four and making the business end of cup competitions.
Villa are a huge club with a European cup to their name but too long ago to be remembered by the bulk of their fans. Putting aside the current shocking run of form that they're on, having scored in one of the last six matches and having thrown away a lead to lose to Spurs this weekend, in general they have haven't won a trophy in 19 years, they sell their best players regularly, their ground has - in two decades - gone from hosting FA Cup Semi Finals and parts of Euro 96 to being a fairly outdated, mediocre ground with poor facilities.
They're rarely in serious danger of relegation yet they never seem to prioritise the cups. They've no hope of challenging towards the top of the table because of the constant flow of money towards the Champions League cartel of clubs and the couple of years where they did manage 6th place finishes under MON they were paying wages in excess of 100% of turnover and it could have bankrupted them.
Somehow they still averaged more than 36,000 fans in the league last season despite tickets not being cheap.
I hope this thread doesn't get moved though because this isn't a thread about Aston Villa. It is a thread about Southend United.
I was too young to be at Bury but I remember promotion at Swansea well and would have personally seen way more than half of the matches that Southend have ever played in the second tier. I can only imagine how it would feel to win promotion from that level to the Premier League and much as it gets maligned on here at times I'd love to see Southend play at that level as surely all of our fans must. But if we go up one day we'll likely come down and maybe that isn't the worst thing.
My friend the Villa fan is jealous of me the Southend fan. I've had three cup finals in ten seasons. Our season rarely finishes before May. His season usually finishes by the second international break with the exception of a couple of games in the FA Cup before a fourth round exit. We're disappointed with an eighth place finish. Finishing eighth would be an amazing achievement for them.
I've no real point I'm trying to make, it is just something I've thought about and remembered when I read the thread about Bournemouth in General Football. Sometimes it is tempting to feel hard-done by in supporting a lower league club. We like to think about ourselves as real fans who go through thick and usually thin. But maybe we're the lucky ones. I'd rather be a Shrimper than a Villain certainly.
Villa are a huge club with a European cup to their name but too long ago to be remembered by the bulk of their fans. Putting aside the current shocking run of form that they're on, having scored in one of the last six matches and having thrown away a lead to lose to Spurs this weekend, in general they have haven't won a trophy in 19 years, they sell their best players regularly, their ground has - in two decades - gone from hosting FA Cup Semi Finals and parts of Euro 96 to being a fairly outdated, mediocre ground with poor facilities.
They're rarely in serious danger of relegation yet they never seem to prioritise the cups. They've no hope of challenging towards the top of the table because of the constant flow of money towards the Champions League cartel of clubs and the couple of years where they did manage 6th place finishes under MON they were paying wages in excess of 100% of turnover and it could have bankrupted them.
Somehow they still averaged more than 36,000 fans in the league last season despite tickets not being cheap.
I hope this thread doesn't get moved though because this isn't a thread about Aston Villa. It is a thread about Southend United.
I was too young to be at Bury but I remember promotion at Swansea well and would have personally seen way more than half of the matches that Southend have ever played in the second tier. I can only imagine how it would feel to win promotion from that level to the Premier League and much as it gets maligned on here at times I'd love to see Southend play at that level as surely all of our fans must. But if we go up one day we'll likely come down and maybe that isn't the worst thing.
My friend the Villa fan is jealous of me the Southend fan. I've had three cup finals in ten seasons. Our season rarely finishes before May. His season usually finishes by the second international break with the exception of a couple of games in the FA Cup before a fourth round exit. We're disappointed with an eighth place finish. Finishing eighth would be an amazing achievement for them.
I've no real point I'm trying to make, it is just something I've thought about and remembered when I read the thread about Bournemouth in General Football. Sometimes it is tempting to feel hard-done by in supporting a lower league club. We like to think about ourselves as real fans who go through thick and usually thin. But maybe we're the lucky ones. I'd rather be a Shrimper than a Villain certainly.
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