Breaking News: This Ashley Young lad is quite good!

I awoke quite early this morning to get to work as soon as possible and hammer out a backlog of shit that I had waiting for me. In classic style our software decided cock-up on us as I was in the thick of it so I figured I'd hop on over to my favourite source of Premier League ins and outs (no transfer pun intended), The Guardian.

Granted I may have already been in a crap mood due to the aforementioned situation coupled with the knowledge that I'd already taken in all available football podcasts, but what I saw on the front page really put me over the edge:

"Ashley Young emerges from the fog to give England a winger windfall."

No shit? Please do educate me! In this article, Paul Hayward goes on to praise the newly found England winger as if he had just burst onto the scene from United's academy.

If the Guardian's Football Weekly podcast (which I love) was not enough regular proof, Hayward's latest effort points to the obvious fact that the British media outside the West Midlands pays little to no attention to Aston Villa FC and the same can be said for just about any club outside the the top 4 or London.

Am I going overboard? Perhaps, but how the hell else would you explain Young's play at Villa (a team where his play out-shined his teammates as opposed to United where he is another phenomenal piece to an already outstanding line-up) not garnering this praise?

Correct me if I'm completely retarded but if Usain Bolt could outsprint cheetahs while wearing trainers, why would you hold off penning the "next great olympian sprinter" article once he's got a brand new pair of state-of-the-art shoes?

I'll stop moaning soon but I've been a fan of Young since his days at Watford and when Villa signed him I was over the moon. And unlike Stewart Downing, whom I still pray winds up on the wrong end of a Joey Barton lunge and snaps his leg in eight pieces, I was comfortably resigned losing Young to United and wish him all the best. He deserves every bit of silverware he gets there. But this repeated dipshittery in the media over him right now smacks of "wow! who's this new guy we've never heard of before??!! He's amazing!!"

You're right. He is. Ask any Villa supporter over the last four years and nearly every one of them would tell you the same thing. But I read less about how amazing he was prior to United and more about what a dive merchant he was and how he "wasn't quite there yet." Did it occur to these morons that Young's problem was not his ability but that he needed better teammates? Not a dig on Villa, but they're not United. Shocker, I know.

I guess it really doesn't matter how pivotal a player you are. If you're not at United, Liverpool, Chelsea, et al then you're not getting much credit. Seems really backwards if you ask me. Barry Sanders didn't have to put up with this shit.

Here's the article: