The Athletic

Hello, I'm Mark Chapman, welcome to the Athletic Football podcast, Adam Crafton and David

Ornstein are with us, and coming up today, we'll discuss

the dismissals of two managers in the Premier League this weekend with both Norwich and

Aston Villa deciding to make changes. We also need a positive story, so we'll talk West Ham

and David Moyes, who last week coached his 1,000th game, and on Sunday saw his side beat Liverpool

to go third in the Premier League.

Let's start with Aston Villa then, who this weekend of Sack their head coach, Dean Smith,

after over three years in charge, they'd lost five games on the bounce.

Greg Evans is the Aston Villa writer for the Athletic.

He joins us all now. Was this a shock, Greg? I don't think you can ever call it a shock in football these days, can you? It just seems that once a team loses a couple of games, three or four games, there always seems to be a crisis building. The fact it was five games for Villa. Didn't surprise me what happened next. I suppose the biggest shock was just Philhar's form in general,

how it turned from, I think last time I was on,

Aston Villa had just won at Man United.

So in the last four or five weeks, things have changed rapidly.

And that's what cost Dean Smith's job, unfortunately.

I thought that the wording of the statement was very interesting because it referred to this year,

not this season, this year.

And if you look at the stats, I think they've lost 18 this year,

and that's the joint most in the Premier League.

So to give the Villa board they're due

and their owners they're due

before we get on to Dean Smith,

...