Birmingham Mail – Never Let The Facts Get In The Way Of A Headline

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

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Worst. Defending. Ever.

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.

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Statshack Aston Villa 2 Wolves 2

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

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Aston Villa 2 Wolves 2

The good news? Aston Villa remain unbeaten in the Premiership this year.  The bad news? Boy, did they have to work hard to maintain that record today.  If they’re honest, Wolves fans might be willing to admit that they put in one of their best performances of the season and wonder why they can’t play like that more often, but I still think that we were our own worst enemy today.

First of all, the game was fantastically entertaining, or at

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Aston Villa Players On Aston Villa

This post was originally scheduled for Friday, but I had to swap some things around so I apologise if it’s a little out of date.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

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Premiership Tables Revised – The Matchday Version

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,

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The Myth Of Squad Rotation

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

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This Season vs Last Season #06

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

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Statshack – Wigan 1 Aston Villa 2

I sometimes struggle to enjoy a game now and again, even ones we win, because the nervous energy doesn’t allow me to relax and be entertained. Maybe you’re the same. Maybe it’s just me. Either way, this wasn’t one of those games, I enjoyed almost every minute, even the final few. OK, maybe not the final few so much and probably not the opening 5 or so minutes, but in between it was really entertaining.

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