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
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
A. 1933
Huh?
Simple. We finished 6th the last 3 seasons in a row. The last time Aston Villa achieved 3 back to back seasons finishing in the top 6 of the top flight English league was 1933. 2nd in 1930/31, 5th in 1931/32 and 2nd again in 1932/33. We all know that we’ve done better than 6th on many occasions since then, but we haven’t managed to string three top 6 seasons together. Until now.
Some people
We’ve been checking in on the Actim Top 100 Index all season long on a roughly monthly basis and I’m very happy to include the final standings in the 2009/10 Season Review series as Villa actually top out the team table with no less than 10 players in the 100. If that surprises you, wait until you see who came in right behind us!
Before I get to that, here are the 10 players who finished in the Top 100
2009/10 has been good for 20 year old Shane Lowry. We got to see a bit of him during last summer’s Peace Cup tournament and he looked a fine prospect, as many of the youngsters did playing alongside the regular first team players.
He made 3 senior appearances early in the season; coming on as a substitute in both legs of the Europa League tie against Rapid Vienna and also late on in the FA Cup win over Brighton at
Fabio Capello has just named his 30 man provisional squad ahead of the World Cup next month and it’s good news for Stephen Warnock, James Milner and Emile Heskey. Not such good news for Ashley Young, Stewart Downing and Gabby Agbonlahor then.
As you’ll see in an upcoming post on the Actim Index Top 100, Gabby is the highest ranked English striker, above Wayne Rooney, but apparently isn’t good enough for England. Emile Heskey does make the cut, but
Just in case you weren’t aware, I’ve been gathering the player ratings submitted to The Telegraph and Sky Sports by fans at least 24 hours after each game to compile the Player of the Month series.
To create the Play of the Year award I’ve taken the average ratings for players who have played some part in at least half of the league matches during 2009/10.
If you’re interested, Martin O’Neill has utilised 23 players in the league during the course of
This is obviously something that should have been done before we played our first game in May, let alone before the season was over, but there you go, it’s done now.
James Milner wins the Player of the Month award for the fourth time this season. Congratulations, James etc. (Can you tell this post is more of a formality?)
I won’t be doing a separate award for the month of May, but I’ll include the scores for the final 2 games
Keith Andrews hit a shot from a little over 25 yards out on the hour mark that forced Brad Friedel’s only save of the match. It was a fine save, but still reasonably routine that you’d expect most goal keepers at this level to deal with with comfort. That was Blackburn’s only shot on target during the 90 minutes, but they somehow managed to head back up the M6 with three points.
In reality, Hoilett shouldn’t have