Aston Villa carved out a vital three points today in an absolutely enthralling battle against Everton at Villa Park with Luke Young providing the only goal of the game in sublime, if unlikely style.
The day didn’t get off to the best of starts when Stephen Ireland pulled a hamstring in the warm up, but his replacement, Nigel Reo-Coker, probably provided that little extra steel that would prove vital in the middle. Nathan Delfouneso took Nigel’s place on the bench.
Everton
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Among much speculation regarding Champions League bound Tottenham trying to get their hands on no-longer-cup-tied Ashley Young, he’s talked up the team’s desire to bounce back against Everton and also his own determination to re-establish himself in the England set up.
Ashley Young
I’m a positive person. You can’t carry defeats around on your shoulders, because you would be going into the next game having too many negative thoughts. You have to look forward.
Of course, the Newcastle result crushed us. We just
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I suppose this might seem like odd timing, but I was planning on compiling and publishing this right before the West Ham game and then Martin O’Neill went and put the kybosh on things. I thought I’d leave the survey open for a little while longer to see whether any of the data trickling in after MON’s departure would take any kind of dip, but I really didn’t see that.
That’s a good thing since I was looking for expectations, not
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I don’t want to enter into a debate about managerial qualities just yet, but if you were screaming out for rotation in the past, you’ve certainly had your fill recently. Last season, Martin O’Neill started just 24 different players in all competitions and received no shortage of criticism, not unfairly in some cases. Just four games into the 2010/11 season and Kevin MacDonald has already used 23 different players in his starting team sheets.
To be fair, MacDonald has
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I don’t know what to say. It looked so good for much of the game, I wrote much of the match report during the game, most of it at half time when it looked bright, then it all fell to pieces in the second half and we’re out. That’s all I have right now, I’ll have to see what I can salvage a little later.
Really, really disappointed. It’s no secret that I really wanted to see us
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Team News Will Appear Here When Available:
Starting XI: Guzan, Cuellar, Collins, Davies, Beye, Reo-Coker, Ireland, Petrov, A Young, Agbonlahor, Heskey.
Subs: Delfouneso, Clark, Lichaj, Bannan, Albrighton, Hogg, Friedel.
Half way through this tie, it’s advantage to Villa and I’m hoping this is going to be a great game. Rapid have to come looking for goals, a goalless draw is no good to them, a 1-1 draw would force extra time, they have to score twice to gain the advantage, but Villa
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If you don’t read Richard Whittall’s ‘A More Splendid Life’ regularly you’re doing yourself a disservice. Richard is a Canadian Villa fan – albeit one I suspect is becoming increasingly jaded with what life in the Premier League has become – based in Toronto and today he’s weighed in on an element of the Bradley-for-Villa story that I also find egregious in ‘This Bradley to Villa thing is embarrassing‘.
It’s a good read and Richard might not be using
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Marc Albrighton and Nathan Delfouneso have been named in Stuart Pearce’s England Under-21 squad to play Portugal on September 3rd and Lithuania on September 7th.
You can see the full squad here. Interestingly, Newcastle’s Andy Carroll has also been called up.
In other news, Sky Sports have interviewed Bob Bradley who pretty much confirmed what we already knew on Sunday. However, by bringing us what is essentially the same news two days later, it’s now “breaking news”. Thanks Sky
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Apologies for the delay. This one hurts, it took some serious motivation to pull it together. I still haven’t seen the whole game, not sure I want to right now, so I can’t really comment on what went wrong. You’ve no doubt all got your own ideas.
I would like to pause briefly to look at the team passing maps side by side though. It’s frequently the case that this level of data won’t reveal much, it’s
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