Why I love Frédéric Guilbert

In the magical semifinal between Aston Villa and Leicester City — you know the one, where Villa scored an early goal, and then Kelechi Iheanacho put in an equalizer around the 70th minute (well done on that one, Magic 8 Ball), and then nothing much of consequence happened...oh, wait. That was the first leg. In the final 20 of the second leg, both sides did their damndest to make a breakthrough, Leicester pushing, Villa trying to get forward on the counter.

Then in came the subs. Mbwana Samatta had already switched places with Keinan Davis before Iheanacho put in the equalizer (I hate that I now know how to spell “Iheanacho” so well), but Villa’s new forward put forth a positive performance. With 13 minutes to go, and Villa pushing to score the winner on the break, off came Anwar El Ghazi for Trézéguet. Seven minutes later, the last change came, with Frédéric Guilbert pulled for Ahmed Elmohamady. It’s almost certain Dean Smith made the change just to bring in a fresh pair of legs, considering Freddy performed quite well on the night, but the man behind the curtain had other ideas:

I have possibly never been so excited in my life over a response to a tweet (ok, well, there was that one time that Pepito Rossi sent me a message defending his love for Bambi, but this is right up there with it).

Anyone who knows me knows I love to criticize clubs’ social media accounts. I mean, if you’re going to invest in a social media coordinator, at least make sure they know how to create banners and gifs in which the players’ heads aren’t chopped off when they feature them dancing around after a goal. I’ve had a slow-burning feud with the AVFC Official Account of Things We All Know™ for pretty much a decade now. I mean, “Three sleeps ‘til kickoff”? We’re not children and the “sleeps” language pretty much vanished from the internets before the AOATWAK™ account started using it. I also have issues with their utterly ridiculous over-reliance on emojis. And let’s not even talk about the language they use surrounding presents when Christmas nears.

But between their inability to judge size, their talk of sleeps, their emojis, and their tendency to resort to laddish speech, I’ve never seen the account snipe at a player like this, not when all is going well and they put in a fairly good display running up and down the pitch for 84 minutes.

The only other time Freddy was mentioned? When they noted their disappointment at his being offside for Samatta’s goal in the first half. Yeah, I’d snipe back too if I’d just helped a team progress to the final, and I’m like, well, the only one who didn’t get any praise.

Calling Twitter account administrators out has just made Guilbert my favorite Villan. You do you, monsieur.