I’m starting to see a pattern here. Richard Dunne wins his third AVC Player of the Month award, this time based on the three Premiership games in January 2010. Anyone still wondering whether we have an adequate replacement for Martin Laursen on our hands? What do you mean Martin who?!?
Player of the Month – January
1st – Richard Dunne – 7.10
2nd – Ashley Young – 6.90
3rd – Stiliyan Petrov – 6.86
Previous Winners
1st
2nd
3rd
December
Richard Dunne (7.67)
James Milner (7.44)
Brad Friedel (7.25)
November
James
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23 down, 15 to go. It must be time to compare progress this season with last season again. You should know the rules by now, but if you’re new to this; I not only compare where we are now compared to the same number of games last season (chronological), I also compare the same fixtures with the 3 promoted teams replacing the 3 relegated teams (apples for apples).
It’s inescapable that we are 7 points worse of this year than
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If you hadn’t seen this game and just saw the statistics below, you might think that Fulham had a good chance in this game and were unlucky not to get something. They weren’t and they weren’t.
The possession finished 55/45 in Fulham’s favour, but midway through the first half it was 43/57. I know this because I was poking fun of the official Fulham Twitter account when they were claiming it was “pretty even stuff”. No, it wasn’t.
However, we
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Aston Villa cruised to a very welcome three points at Craven Cottage today with a Gabby Agbonlahor brace just before half time, capping an impressive first half performance. Arsene Wenger would no doubt have appreciated the healthy mixture of short and long play.
The second half was perhaps more an effort in containment, but the danger of the counter attack was of course ever present from the Claret and Blues. Fulham huffed and puffed and did manage to score
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Hopefully you’ve spotted that I include the number of good and bad passes in the Statshacks and maybe you find it interesting. Maybe you don’t. There’s a certain logic which suggests that the higher the number of passes, the more expansive the style of play. That’s crude and overly simplistic, but there is enough correlation that I thought I’d look at how we’ve been doing over the last few seasons.
One thing that’s immediately obvious when looking at
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This doesn’t include the Arsenal game, but as we haven’t had an update in 2010 so far I thought it was about time to check out the latest Actim Index. Gabby’s dropped down a place to 5th, but it’s an impressive foursome ahead of him – Cesc Fabregas, Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka and Wayne Rooney. Not too shabby then.
5th Gabriel Agbonlahor – 350 points
15th Ashley young – 310 points
18th Richard Dunne – 304 points
24th James Milner – 293
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Maybe not a classic, but pretty entertaining, especially in the second half, and a very even affair this one. Arsenal hit the woodwork twice, but otherwise it was Aston Villa doing most of the pressing. Let’s just take a quick look at the shots either side managed to fire off:-
The blue are on target. The red are off-target and the dotted red lines indicate the two shots which hit the post and crossbar. The grey lines are
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Last month I took a brief look at how Aston Villa’s passing statistics stacked up against the other teams in the Premiership and although we’re just in the bottom half of the table in terms of the number of passes strung together, I think it was clear that we are simply efficient in our approach. To call us a “long ball team” is a mischaracterization.
Apparently Arsene Wenger has used this term to discuss the way we played against his
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For Villa fans this won’t be new or shocking, but I thought I’d share nonetheless. Last Wednesday, after our amazing 6-4 victory over Blackburn in the Carling Cup Semi-Final, I was browsing around the interwebz and I ended up on the The Sun’s website. Don’t judge me.
Sure I’m biased, but I thought that Villa coming back from 2 goals down at home to win the game in a ten goal thriller was quite a story. Surely the fact
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