We were promised an announcement confirming Alex McLeish’s appointment by now*, but that’s about as timely as everything else connected to the search for a manager, so I thought I’d share something I was just looking at instead.
For one reason or another, it doesn’t matter why, someone put it to me on Twitter that all MON’s Villa side did was hoof it up the pitch; the old long ball. It’s not a new charge, of course, or particularly accurate
The headline I went with when Martin O’Neill walked out on Aston Villa was something along the lines of “They think he’s taken us as far as he can… he has now“. It was a reference to the persistent theme among the growing dissent that our club was stagnating under his stewardship and also the fact that the record would forever confirm that that would indeed be as far as he could take the club.
The truth is, we’ll never know
It was 30 years ago today that Aston Villa last won a league title when we were crowned English Champions despite losing our final game in a season that went to the wire.
If you had glanced at the old First Division table on the morning of May 2nd 1981 you’d have seen the top half looking like this:
1980/81
Pld
W
D
L
GF
GA
GD
Pts
Aston Villa
41
26
8
7
72
38
34
60
Ipswich
40
23
10
7
74
38
36
56
Arsenal
41
18
15
8
59
45
14
51
Notts Forest
41
19
11
11
61
43
18
49
West Brom
40
19
11
10
56
40
16
49
Southampton
41
19
10
12
73
54
19
48
Man Utd
42
15
18
9
51
36
15
48
Liverpool
39
15
17
7
59
40
19
47
Tottenham
41
14
15
12
68
64
4
43
Leeds
40
17
9
14
39
45
-6
43
Stoke
41
11
18
12
48
58
-10
40
We were heading to Highbury to take on Arsenal in our final game needing a point to guarantee the
I was one of a number of people to Re-Tweet this little gem before the kick off at Upton Park last weekend:
I noticed one or two people copy & pasting the contents, including both hashtags, to pass it off as their own (which is pretty lame), but I believe @Jacko442 is the originator.
By the final whistle, Bent had added to his tally and had another one chalked off for a foul only the referee saw. (You can add that to
There’s a lot of emotion, anger and fear floating around the Villasphere at the moment so I’m going to tread carefully here. I’m not looking to make any particular point, but I do want to correct one or two claims I’m seeing which are factually inaccurate.
Facts are what I do, I’ll leave the opinion to you the reader.
The question in the headline might draw a multitude of answers, and possibly some less than savoury language, but I’m talking in terms
I was planning on running this series every five games, but for one reason or another I didn’t get to it after the 25th game of the season; the 3-1 loss at Old Trafford. I really wish I had because now 26 games into the season, what I have to share isn’t pleasant.
After the 2-2 draw against Fulham at Villa Park we now have 29 points. Unfortunately, that’s our worst points haul from the first 26 games in the history
Jean Makoun picked up the Man of the Match award against Fulham and has rightly won the plaudits from most quarters. But not everyone is impressed.
It’s true that his tackling isn’t the greatest just yet, but his passing is exemplary; he was the leading passer on the pitch against bother Man Utd and Fulham.
But the devil is always in the detail, passing numbers alone can distort the true picture. For instance, lots and lots of backwards and sideways passes can’t
You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been following Premier League games up with Statshacks for a little while. There are numerous reasons for that which I won’t bore you with, but I have still been glancing at the numbers and I have to bring Jean Makoun’s passing statistics from Old Trafford last night to your attention.
I don’t always single individual players out and I don’t keep records, but I do look them over and it’s rare
With Darren Bent looking like a racing certainty at this stage, I figured it was safe to take a look at his career stats in the same format as Jean Makoun recently.
Bent has been successful throughout his career with a couple of notable exceptions; his eyebrow raising £16.5m move to Tottenham won’t be remembered all that fondly and for some reason it just hasn’t clicked for him at senior level for England.
That said, after the season he put together