Stone has been a Villa fan since he moved to Birmingham as a young boy and his uncle bought him a club shirt.<\/p>\n
“No-one told me who to support, but that’s how it started,” he told BBC Sport. <\/p>\n
“I lived in Walthamstow to start with, and I wasn’t into football then, but when I moved it was around the same time my uncle gave me that top and I just think that being in Birmingham, it all made sense. <\/p>\n
“I just didn’t let go of the shirt. It had AST as the sponsors, so it was old-school even then, although I can’t remember exactly what year it was.<\/p>\n
“I hardly ever took it off. My mum tells me that when she wanted to wash it, I used to wait by the washing machine waiting for it to finish, so I could wear it some more.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got to be honest though, I wasn’t that loyal to begin with. <\/p>\n
“My favourite Villa player was Darius Vassell, and when he moved to Manchester City my cousins used to make fun of me when I came back to London, because I was such a big fan of his that I wore a City shirt for a bit.<\/p>\n
“As well as Vassell, I just remember Thomas Hitzlsperger was amazing – he had a rocket shot on him – and up front Juan Pablo Angel was brilliant, then Gabriel Agbonlahor too.”<\/p>\n
Some Villa legends there, but what about a certain Chris Sutton, who joined Villa in 2006?<\/p>\n
“It was a short stint he had with us, wasn’t it?” added Stone.<\/p>\n
“I obviously know him as a pundit, but I don’t really remember him much as a Villa player. Sorry, Chris!”<\/p>\n
Chris Sutton and Kofi Stone were speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan. <\/p>\n
The AI predictions were generated using Microsoft Copilot Chat – we simply asked the tool to ‘predict this weekend’s Premier League scores’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stone has been a Villa fan since he moved to Birmingham as a young boy and his uncle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-314085","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}