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
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
The last 4 minutes of this game suggested to me that David Moyes didn’t bring his side to Villa Park for a draw, a result which doesn’t help either side very much. However, with his nose in front, make no mistake, Everton parked the bus in the second half of this game.
Nothing wrong with that, it’s a perfectly valid tactic, we’ve done it ourselves many a time. Actually, we tended to do it in the past against opposition
Martin O’Neill has talked about needing to win the next 6 games to have a chance of finishing in the top 4. He’s probably right. That’s clearly the intention within the camp: Carlos Cuellar most recent updates on Twitter and Facebook talked about tonight being the first of our “cup finals” to get to the top four. That’s pretty encouraging, at least for me.
I suppose the only downside with that mentality is that the instant they fail
Congratulations to our reserve side who have won the Barclays Premier Reserve League South for the third year running following their 2-1 win over Fulham at Bodymoor tonight. They still have a couple of games to play, but are 5 points clear of second place Arsenal with a game in hand.
As winners of the southern league, they’ll have to face the winners from the north in a play-off final in early May. Off the top of my head,
I don’t expect an answer, so I’ll use this post to draw a line under the disappointment of the FA Cup semi final at the weekend, but Howard Webb, The FA, The Referees Association, anyone with any kind of vested interest, should consider this an open letter of sorts and feel free to respond with an explanation.
We all know what happened in the 16th minutes of this game. Just about anyone who is honest and has the use of
Does what it says on the tin, these are quite literally the random thoughts I have running through my head right now. Apologies if this turns into an incoherent ramble, it’s tricky to assemble much order at the moment. I’m not looking to make excuses here, the better quality side won through in the end.
Officiating
I’m generally not one to moan about referees. The reason for this is simple; I want humans refereeing, not robots, and humans make
The scoreline flatters Chelsea, every honest Blues fan will admit it.
The positives: we were fantastic during the first 45 minutes. Defensively immaculate from front to back. Chelsea weren’t exactly at their best and unforced errors littered their play, but take nothing away from the Villa boys who all knew exactly what they had to do and carried it out to the letter.
Of course, you know a major game officiated by Howard Webb would not be without controversy.