After a brief break astonvillacentral.com is back in action. I’ve moved hosts and implemented a new design. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but it’s good enough to use – at least for phase one, phase two is a bigger project. The main thing is the performance – this place is like lightning compared to the last hosts!! So if you’ve visited in the past, but didn’t stay long because the pages just took too long to load, then I hope you can now browse around at your leisure.

In news you probably already know, Villa played their second pre-season warm up game in Colchester yesterday and had to come back from two goals down to tie it 2-2. Sidwell got the first just after the hour and young Adam McGurk got the final touch on Andreas Weimann’s shot to draw level 8 minutes later. A lot of the junior players got chance to prove themselves again and it will be interesting to see how many of them make the trip out to Spain with the seniors.

And finally, I may have been a little harsh on Jack and Paul about their trip to Spain. Turns out that neither of them are driving, but that allows them to keep us updated with their progress. You can keep up to date with their journey here.