The long ball debate doesn’t want to go away.  Apparently Brad Friedel has recently suggested that Tottenham are fairly fond of the odd long ball themselves and I found Harry Redknapp’s response quite amusing.  He basically said that Spurs weren’t a long ball team, but at the same time it’s sensible to hit a few long passes when you’ve got someone like Peter Crouch in the side and, ultimately, lots of short passes sideways and backwards don’t achieve much.  For once, I find myself in agreement with ‘Arry.

Sky Sports News just showed a little table which classed the top 3 and bottom 3 Premiership sides in terms of number of passes made that were over 30 yards.  Guess who was top.  Yup, Tottenham with 1769.  Aston Villa came in at 18th with 1310.

Ah, but if you don’t have the ball much then you’re unlikely to make many passes and the number of long passes is bound to be less than the teams who pass the ball a lot.  True, but if you express this number of long passes as a percentage of the total completed passes – Tottenham 8291 and Aston Villa 5672 – you’ll get 21.3% and 23.1% respectively. So out of every 100 passes, Villa will hit 2 more passes over 30 yards than Tottenham. In the course of the average game that will be between 4 and 6 passes. Big deal.

I’ve been keeping check of Aston Villa players in the Actim Top 100 Index for the last couple of seasons and someone once asked me whether we always have so many players in the Top 100 because MON makes so few changes to the line up. Yes, that is a factor that certainly helps, it can’t be denied. However, Actim measures contribution to a winning team, so they may be playing more games than some of the other players in the index, but they have to be getting the job done first and foremost.

In the same way, we generally have less possession and pass the ball less than our major competitors, yet we’re still very much in the hunt for gatecrashing the top four’s party. It’s about getting the job done first and foremost. In short; we do more with less – every minimalist should be a Villa fan.

Martin O’Neill might well take issue with that last statement and, if so, he’d have valid a point. It’s not as if we don’t have any style.  We most certainly do, in absolute spades at times, just not frequently enough for everyone’s liking and perhaps infrequently enough for our critics to point to as the shortcoming holding us back from challenging at the very highest level.

I would disagree with that sentiment entirely though. For me, it’s merely a question of time. We’ve been continually improving ever since MON joined the club, both on and off the field, and with a very decent, but still young squad in place, the old architectural principle of form following function will prove to be the case with Aston Villa.

Will a Martin O’Neill team ever stroke the ball around like an Arsene Wenger side? Unlikely. And I certainly hope not anyway. A meme describing Arsenal’s football floating around the Twittersphere tends to go a little something like “pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, wide”. A characture for sure, but not an unfair one and a classic case of style over substance.

If watching grown men waste time is your idea of sport, I might suggest that watching NFL, where you can spend 4 hours watching just 11 minutes of actual play, would be more up your street.  Me, I’ll stick with watching my simple, yet effective Aston Villa side thanks.  Although, if they could score a few more goals I’d like it a lot better!!