If you’re a Villa fan with a holiday in the Algarve booked around the end of July / beginning of August you just lucked out! The club have announced a couple of pre-season friendlies in Portgual as part of the Guadiana Cup; an annual mini-tournament hosted by Benfica.
The format varies, some years four teams have competed, others just three, it’s not unknown for it to feature only two. This summer it looks like it will be three, with Feyenoord
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I’ll just leave this here…
Rejected.
Oh, while I think about it…. Gareth Barry… £12m? I guess this confirms what we already knew… he’s just a poor man’s James Milner!
The first thing I read this morning was Matt Slater’s blog chronicling his experience attending Randy Lerner’s press conference at Villa Park last week. The details of what Randy had to say during the event have filtered out through the usual sources in the days that followed, but I was particularly interested to read Matt’s account for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it was from one of the Tweets that Matt made during the actual press conference that I picked
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The curtain fell on a fascinating La Liga season this past weekend with Barcelona crowned champions in triumphant style, but Madrid running them a close second. In fact, Real Madrid have earned more points this season than any team in La Liga history… except one… Barcelona 2009/10.
I know some people are fond of suggesting that the three 6th place finishes mean Aston Villa have not progressed, despite the year-on-year improvement in performance over the last 4 years, and love
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Here’s a little statistical curiosity which helps flesh out the picture I’ve been painting recently of relativity. Go back to February 10th and take a look at the table which shows the records of teams against clubs in the top half of the table only. We were second behind Chelsea ahead of our game against Man Utd, which was a draw and left our position intact.
Here’s the same table at the end of the season:-
Team
Pld
W
D
L
F
A
GD
Pts/Gm
Pts
Chelsea
18
10
3
5
40
18
22
1.83
33
Man Utd
18
10
3
5
28
19
9
1.83
33
Tottenham
18
9
4
5
25
24
1
1.72
31
Man City
18
7
5
6
30
24
6
1.44
26
Arsenal
18
7
4
7
33
26
7
1.38
25
Everton
18
6
7
5
30
31
-1
1.38
25
Liverpool
18
6
5
7
19
20
-1
1.27
23
Aston
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You thought our season was over, didn’t you? Not quite. We’ve been sending some of the young lions over to Hong Kong each summer for at least the last 8 years to participate in the Hong Kong Soccer Sevens tournament and it’s something we’ve had a fair amount of success in.
Earlier today a team that included Nathan Delfouneso, Marc Albrighton and Ciaran Clark won the trophy for a 5th time, beating Glasgow Rangers 3-2 in the final.
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I recently mentioned in flippant fashion that League attendance was down a little at Villa Park this past season, but since we had more cup games – leading to 2 trips to Wembley – and less European matches, I thought it worth looking at overall attendance this year.
Despite falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League, Villa Park still played host to 25 games this season, compared with 27 in 2008/09. When you consider that somewhere in the
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As part of the 2009/10 Season Review, I thought it wouldn’t be bad idea to actually list all 52 games that Villa played during the season in order. I’ve highlighted the scores of the games that we lost – there’s only 11 – and provided links to Statshacks where available. There’s some summary statistics at the bottom. Plenty more coming, I’m just a bit slow getting to it.
It’s taken a little longer to pull this post together
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Randy Lerner is conducting a press conference, as promised, right at this moment and Twitter is lit up with the owner’s confirmation that Martin O’Neill isn’t going anywhere. Since I never thought he was, this isn’t news to me. However, if you look hard enough there have been one or two interesting nuggets floating around which will emerge during the course of the day.
Randy has insisted that James Milner isn’t going anywhere either. Again, not news to
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