Aston Villa 3 Brighton 2 – FA Cup 4th Round

Aston Villa will be in tomorrow’s FA Cup 5th round draw after cruising past Brighton and Hove Albion at Villa Park today. Don’t let the scoreline fool you. As suspected, MON rang the changes to give some tired legs a much needed rest and employed a fairly unusual system:-

Delfouneso

Downing

A Young

Sidwell
Albrighton

Delph

Warnock
Collins
Beye
L Young

Guzan

The introduction of Albrighton and Delfouneso paid dividends almost immediately with Albrighton feeding the forward to open the scoring inside the first 5 minutes. Unfortunately the wing

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Aston Villa vs Brighton – FA Cup 4th Round

Since we’re all probably still riding on a high from achieving our first Wembley final in 10 years, can anyone think of the link from that game to this one? Answer at the bottom.

Alright, word on the street is that MON will ring the changes and rest some very tired legs after Wednesday’s heroics. Quite right too. From the sounds of things, Fabian Delph will be starting in the middle with either Reo-Coker or Steve Sidwell alongside

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From Sky Sports – Gardner Fee Agreed With City

Sky Sports are reporting that Aston Villa and Birmingham City have a agreed a fee for Craig Gardner to make the switch across the city and it sounds like it’s just a formality of medical and agreeing terms next week.  I know there’s a lot of fans who rate Craig highly and won’t want to see him leave, especially to go to them.

However, like Gary Cahill before him, Craig wants to play first team football and is several places down

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Strong Financial Stewardship Sets Aston Villa Up For The Future

Proud History, Bright Future.

A tag line, PR spin, just a bit of marketing guff perhaps, but it’s a simple little sentence that strikes the right chord with most Villa fans.  I’ve always liked it and it sums up Aston Villa at the moment as well as any four words possibly could.  I’m really talking about Aston Villa under the management of Martin O’Neill and, more specifically, the ownership of Randy Lerner.

When it comes to team management it’s frequently speculated that

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One Little Cup Final And The Transfer Speculation Reignites

Actually, I don’t know if there’s really any connection, but just days after Martin O’Neill has said he’s not looking to sell or buy and then later pretty much admitted that if he did want to buy, he’d have to first sell, we have a couple of pieces of speculation floating around today.

This morning all the talk was of Glasgow Rangers’ Kris Boyd “being in talks” with Aston Villa, which the club later distanced themselves from a little, although they’ve

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Aston Villa 6 Blackburn 4 – Carling Cup Wallpaper

I’m still buzzing from last night!! I haven’t had chance to write anything else about the game, but I did get my crayons out to make a wallpaper for your desktop enjoyment.  The usual resolutions (1280×800, 1280×1024 & 1024×768) are available here.

This may be the last wallpaper I upload for a little while as I have a new Aston Villa Wallpaper mini-site in development and it’s a bit of extra work to publish to two places.

WEM-BER-LEY WEM-BER-LEEEEEEEEEEEEEY

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
We’re going to WEM-BER-LEY!!!
Que Sera, Sera

Aston Villa 6 Blackburn Rovers 4 (Agg. 7 – 4)

They did it!! Aston Villa have booked their first cup final appearance since the FA Cup back in 2000!!!

Villa being Villa, they didn’t do it the easy way. What drama at Villa Park tonight… who would have predicted TEN goals?? Certainly not this blogger. At least the fans at VP got their money’s worth tonight.

Villa got

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Kick Off Less Than Two Hours Away

OK, we’re just hours away from kicking off one of the most important games in recent memory and I have to admit to being both excited and not a little nervous.

It’s effectively half time, but we have the advantage of having the lead and the home support for the second half. We’re just 90 minutes away from booking our first trip to Wembley in a decade!!

Martin O’Neill knows all about the League Cup and I can’t imagine for a

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On The Quest For Goals – Playing With Formation

You might not realise it to look at lengthy tomes like yesterday’s post exploring the statistics of when goals are scored and conceded, but sometimes I have to cut things out. For the sake of brevity (don’t laugh) I stuck with the premise that in order to open the goal scoring flood gates again the team really just need to slow down and employ a little patience. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit more to it than that.

The question at

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