My personal feeling about this game is that MON gambled. He rolled the dice on Richard Dunne and James Milner’s fitness and neither looked like they should have started this game. Richard Dunne was caught off guard on a number of occasions and it was clear he was off the pace. James Milner struggled to make any impact in this game and it was little surprise that he left the pitch in the 77th minute. I
It’s that time of the month again, time to see how our players are measuring up according to the Actim Top 100 Index. This time we once again have 8 players in the top 100:-
6th Gabriel Agbonlahor – 489 points
14th Richard Dunne – 425 points
15th Carlos Cuellar – 411 points
16th James Milner – 408 points
17th Ashley Young – 397 points
28th Brad Friedel – 368 points
63rd Stiliyan Petrov – 301 points
79th James Collins – 288 points
James Collins slipped 10 places,
Well done to the Birmingham Mail for another piece of awesome journalism, the Pulitzer is surely just a matter of time. They’ve taken the following quote from Martin O’Neill:-
Expectation levels I expect to go up because it is Aston Villa, then you are hoping you can make something happen for the supporters. However, like everybody else, you have to earn this and it is not a case of just because a club has been successful in the past
Call this karma for John Carew’s offside opener if you like, but the defending on Wolves equaliser yesterday was just comical. I’m all for zonal marking, but let’s have some common sense – there’s absolutely no point having two quality centre backs like Collins and Cuellar marking thin air.
I apologise for the poor quality pics here, I’m working with screen caps of the first replays available online, better quality video may be available by the time you read this.
I think we’ve touched on this in the past, but one of the weaknesses of our current system when we play two strikers is that it can leave Petrov a little over run. Perhaps I was hasty in wondering whether his mind was elsewhere and maybe he just had a tough game. Either way, he wasn’t able to stamp his usual authority on the game.
Let’s start with a graphic showing the two systems against each other, and this
This post was originally scheduled for Friday, but I had to swap some things around so I apologise if it’s a little out of date. I noticed that quite a few headlines featuring Villa players “hailing” this and that seemed to be flowing through the wires yesterday, so I figured that the press had been given access to some of the players and it might be a good idea to compile a quick list.
Ashley Young is looking forward
One of the great things about tournaments such as the European Championships, World Cup or even the Champions and Europa Leagues is the fact that the fixture list generally doesn’t get messed around with and all the teams play their games sequentially so we can always see at a glance the true standings in the tables. There’s never any “game in hand” nonsense to be concerned with.
With 20 teams competing over 380 Premiership matches during a 10 month span,
Martin O’Neill takes some stick over his rotation policy at Aston Villa, or lack of rotation to be more precise, and I think even his most ardent supporters are likely to agree that he could mix it up at least a little more than he does. Although I struggle to accept that professional athletes in their early 20’s get “tired” from playing a game or two of football a week (plus the travel and training of course), I’d count
I’ve really been looking forward to getting to this one. 28 games played, 10 left to go.
If you’ve been keeping a concerned eye on the fact that we’ve been running a little behind last year’s performance points wise lately then you may well have failed to realise that we were approaching the point where the wheels fell off the wagon last year. To be more precise; around this time last year we lost 4 on the bounce (games