First things first; CT scans have revealed that Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink has suffered no long-term damage following his nasty clash of heads with Richard Dunne. That’s good news indeed, it’s always a concern when someone apparently spends so long unconscious. He’ll be able to train next week and should be able to play again before the end of the season.
To the game itself. Well, we won this in the first 25 minutes and then coasted to
With Liverpool recovering from their road trip to Madrid for Thursday’s Europa League semi final tie against Atletico, Villa re-took that 6th place in the league with a slightly stuttered performance in Hull to keep the pressure on the teams around us as the end of the season looms.
Three points which are vitally important to this season of course, but it also mean that we became only the fifth team to amass 1,000 points since the Premiership was born back
It’s probably entirely fair that the majority of the sane football world regard Barcelona as the best team on the planet at the moment and Lionel Messi as the world’s best player. Inter Milan were the under dogs for last night’s Champions League semi final and whilst Barcelona aren’t massively superior on a man-for-man basis, it was also fair to describe them as the favourites.
But a funny thing happened; Barcelona lost 3-1.
That’s not what is intriguing me and causing
That’s how many Premiership games that Martin O’Neill has prowled the Aston Villa technical area “like a panther”. The significance? Oh, it’s the same number as John Gregory, which means that MON will effectively become our longest serving manager during the Premiership era when he takes charge of his 149th EPL game at Hull on Wednesday.
It seems a good time to update what is a loose series of posts analysing the current manager’s league performance in comparison with
In case you weren’t aware, Fabian Delph was stretchered out of Bodymoor on Saturday with a “serious knee injury” and immediately went for scans to assess the damage. The news is not good, here’s the official statement from the club:-
AVFC
Fabian Delph suffered a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament [ACL] in his left knee in training on Saturday at Bodymoor Heath. This has been confirmed by clinical examinations and scans.
Fabian will undergo ACL reconstruction at the appropriate time
The most significant statistic in this game was the sheer number of passes. You have to go back to Wigan at Villa Park in April 2007 to find the last game with more complete passes – 361. In fact, there’s only one other game with more passes since MON came to Villa; Charlton at home in September 2006. Incidentally, the Wigan game finished 1-1, the Charlton game was a 2-0 win.
Perceptions
I think I’ve said before that one
Aston Villa came away from Fratton Park with a vitally important and well earned three points after a game against Portsmouth that will surely have had many Villa fans tearing their hair out for much of the game. Michael Brown scored a rare goal for Portsmouth to open the scoring against the run of play inside the first 10 minutes. Carew restored the status quo 7 minutes later, but it took until the 82nd minute for Villa to
This is the final part of the series comparing this season against last season both chronologically and using and apples to apples comparison. In case you missed it, I chose at the beginning to map the following 3 promoted teams to 3 relegated teams:-
Birmingham City = West Brom
Burnley = Middlesbrough
Wolves = Newcastle
I’m going to use the same tables and graphs from Part 6, but I just wanted to add some “big picture” perspective before we go on. We’ve
James Milner’s season continues to go from strength to strength. First he was listed in Ollie Irish’s Top 10 Premier League Players Of The Season and now he’s been nominated for the 2009/10 PFA Young Player of the Year award.
Andy Gray holds the 1977 PFA Player of the Year and Aston Villa Central Player of the Year Awards
Villa have a reasonably rich history with this award. Andy Gray won in 1977 and also picked up the