AVC Player of the Month – December

Congratulations to Richard Dunne who wins the AVC Player of the Month award for the second time this season, reiterating what a fantastic acquisition he has been.

Player of the Month – December

1st – Richard Dunne – 7.67
2nd – James Milner – 7.44
3rd – Brad Friedel – 7.25

Previous Winners

1st
2nd
3rd

November
James Milner (7.15)
Carlos Cuellar (7.04)
Brad Friedel (6.89)

October
Richard Dunne (7.21)
James Collins (7.14)
Gabby Agbonlahor (6.69)

September
Gabby Agbonlahor (7.34)
Brad Friedel (7.28)
James Milner (7.23)

August
James Milner (7.03)
Brad Friedel (6.91)
Stiliyan Petrov (6.57)

With James Milner also winning two awards and

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Statshack – Aston Villa 0 Liverpool 1

For some reason or another I neglected to create a Statshack for the 3-1 victory over Liverpool at Anfield, so I’ll take the rare step here of including it below the stats from last night’s 1-0 loss at Villa Park. It might be interesting to compare the two.

0
Aston Villa
Dec 29th 2009
Liverpool
1

42
Possession %
58

9
Shots
15

4
On Target
4

8
Corners
10

0
Offsides
1

Scorers
93′ Torres

Dunne
Booked
Lucas

Sent Off

214
Good Passes
325

60
Bad Passes
81

35
Interceptions
18

36
Tackles Won
37

21
Tackles Lost
29

7
Blocks
1

12
Free Kicks
13

Starting XI:
1. Friedel
2. Young
25. Warnock

24. Cuellar
5. Dunne
19. Petrov
20. Reo-Coker

8. Milner
6. Downing
10. Carew
11. Agbonlahor

Subs:
22. Guzan
14. Delfouneso
4. Sidwell

12. Albrighton
29. Collins
23. Beye
16. Delph

Average

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This Season vs Last Season #04

Can you believe that we’re already at the half way point of the season, played everyone else in league once and about to begin the rematches, starting with Liverpool tomorrow? As promised, it’s time to again compare this season’s league performance with last year. As it’s the half-season point, we’ll also take a quick look a bit deeper into the history books.

Firstly, let’s just look at the usual “Chronological” and “Apples for Apples” comparisons. Last time I did

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Statshack – Arsenal 3 Aston Villa 0

Statistically speaking, this game closely resembles the three victories over Liverpool, Chelsea and Man Utd. The one major detail that differs significantly is the scoreline of course.

Villa presented little threat to Almunia’s goal in the second half, but it was certainly more a case of Arsenal eventually making their chances pay after the break and there will be little argument about who can be credited with that fact.

It’s not often that a single player comes off the bench to

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Statshack – Aston Villa 1 Stoke City 0

An old friend of mine, a Baggies fan, emailed me to say that as much as he hated to admit it, Stoke’s disallowed goal should have stood and asked what I thought. I didn’t disagree, but goals change games so we shouldn’t assume that the rest of the game would have played out exactly the same to end in a 1-1 draw. I’m confident that we would have found the necessary goals to win the game and the

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Statshack – Sunderland 0 Aston Villa 2

I’m bringing the average position map back for this game since Milner, Ash, Downing, Gabby & Heskey aren’t all in one big pile! I think this one is a pretty decent depiction of how the current system functions.

As far as the numbers go, well you can see for yourself. Had we not scored more goals than Sunderland and, therefore, won the game, might this be evidence of our shortcomings for any of the overly vocal detractors floating around

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Villa Players in Actim Top 100 – Dec 15th 2009

I haven’t had chance to do an Actim post for a little while, but worry not, I do keep an eye on the data.  I’ve been waiting for the Index to be updated with the data from the weekend as I had a sneaky suspicion that our players would benefit from a certain victory over a certain team from Manchester.

The Index was finally updated today and it’s better news than I thought. Partially due to our victory over Man

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QuickStat: Aston Villa Passing and Shooting

I was just checking out a table on this Sky Sports page which shows the total successful passes for the Premiership and a couple of things stood out for me that I thought were worth sharing.

Firstly, if you take the table and sort by successful passes it looks like this:-

Team
Goals
Shots
On Target
Shot Accuracy
Succ Passes

1
Man Utd
34
208
93
45%
6725

2
Chelsea
40
268
125
47%
6588

3
Liverpool
32
216
99
46%
6519

4
Arsenal
40
196
104
53%
6137

5
Tottenham
35
227
110
48%
5336

6
Fulham
20
166
70
42%
4886

7
West Ham
24
190
85
45%
4867

8
Wigan
19
192
90
47%
4755

9
Man City
29
168
85
51%
4609

10
Everton
22
178
82
46%
4322

11
Portsmouth
14
182
68
37%
4103

12
Burnley
20
142
63
44%
4063

13
Aston Villa
26
136
59
43%
3639

14
Birmingham
16
135
70
52%
3521

15
Blackburn
16
164
67
41%
3493

16
Hull
17
124
56
45%
3458

17
Wolves
15
135
50
37%
3427

18
Sunderland
22
143
61
43%
3361

19
Bolton
20
165
64
39%
2665

20
Stoke
15
129
47
36%
2610

Hopefully you noticed that Portsmouth have made 13% more successful passes than Aston Villa and yet they hug the bottom of the only table

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Statshack – Man Utd 0 Aston Villa 1

There’s so many positives that we can extract from this game, it’s difficult to know where to start. OK, well it’s the result, obviously. You have to go back to August 1995 for the last time we beat Man Utd in the league and back again to November 1983 for the last time it happened at Old Trafford.

Naturally the highlight from the game is Gabby’s 21st minute goal, but MON’s men were true to the gaffer’s word and

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