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
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
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
OK, it’s not that good, or all that funny, but this is what I’ve been playing around in the last 24 hours or so. (Click for slightly larger, full colour version).
Wow!! I’m still recovering from this one folks… and I’m going to watch it again as soon as I’m finished with this, only this time I won’t be chewing my nails off!!
There’s so much to say, I hardly know where to start. Firstly, I suppose, it’s been 14 years since we’ve taken all three points from Man Utd. 14 years!! I’m tempted to point out to MON’s detractors and other McExperts among the Villa fan base that
Quick preview. Actually, more of an excuse to show ABthegiant’s latest Pre-Smack Talk video.
We know that Man Utd are suffering a massive shortage of defensive players, but they’ve still managed to comprehensively beat West Ham and Wolfsburg away from home. They may have Vidic back for this game, but they surely can’t be too happy about having to face the likes of Milner, Ash, Downing and Gabby right now.
Michael Owen may have struck a hatrick in Germany this
I sometimes think there’s something of a bubble around the Premiership that fans need to poke their heads out of now and again. In fact, that bubble probably envelopes all of English football, but mostly the Premiership.
We obviously all recognise that on a European level, on the pitch at least, the main competition for English clubs comes from Spain and Italy, and to a lesser degree, Germany and France. I may have spoken about this before, but when
Last night I noticed a Tweet pop up from another Aston Villa blog which featured a headline along the lines of “Carew off to Turkey?” and I have to admit it irritated me. It irked me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the rumour mongering regarding John Carew has become a bone of contention with me and I’ve written several posts quoting both player and manager, hopefully painting a picture of content.
I first jumped on the opportunity to
Hopefully by now you’ve seen the three goals from this game and if so, I’m willing to bet that you enjoyed the slightly unusual nature of all of them. Richard Dunne thumped Villa into the lead with a very non-central defender like shot that ricocheted in off the underside of the cross bar from about 8 or 9 yards. Just as impressive was the pass James Milner fed the Irishman in acres of space under cries of “shoot”