I pointed out in the preview for the Rapid Vienna game that the Austrian side weren’t having the best of starts to their domestic season either. You’d never have known that from the quality of the support the team received from the home fans throughout the game.
I made a couple of comments on Twitter about the Villans facing such a hostile crowd and half-joked about them having to face another one for the second leg at Villa Park.
I spotted this pic of Sidwell on the OS and I couldn’t resist… well, I needed to cheer myself up.
Villa got off to the worst of starts in Vienna tonight. 15 seconds. That’s all it took for Rapid Vienna to take the lead.
From kick off they ran into Reo-Coker in front of the back four forcing the ball to be spread out to their left. The ball was whipped in early and it fell neatly on to the head of Jelavic to nod in. I say ‘fell neatly’ mainly because Curtis Davies was flat on
I was just browsing through one of my picture folders and I stumbled on these old motivational posters I made. It looks like they’re all from April ’08, so some of them are outdated (apologies to Stan!!), but I thought I’d share them anyway…
I know, it’s just silly, but sometimes that’s just how I roll.
A few days ago a story appeared on the OS that featured a quote from Martin O’Neill that he’s rightly taken some stick over:-
At the end of last week, I went to a meeting for managers and they put up some interesting statistics. They showed that 17 of our lads had played in the Barclays Premier League last season. Other teams had used 23, 27 and others over 30. I was a wee bit surprised. I knew how
I just saw a comment on a forum somewhere that made me chuckle. A poster was countering this ‘lost the dressing room’ nonsense by pointing out that Brad Friedel has recently compared Martin O’Neill to Sir Alex Ferguson in terms of his authority, command and respect at Aston Villa. He quite rightly points to this aspect being a key element in Man Utd’s growth to the club they are today.
Another poster totally missed the point and argued:-
Fergie has
If you’ve seen the squad that Martin O’Neill is taking to Austria then you know that he’s taking this tie seriously. Then again, when I looked at who he left out, this squad must have practically picked itself. Luke Young, Bouma, Downing, Harewood are all injured and Salifou has been sick for a while.
Obviously we’re all looking for both a performance and result from this game, it’s important that the team bounce back from the opening day debacle.
Aston Villa have just announced a 22-man squad to travel to Austria for Thursday’s Europa League tie against Rapid Vienna. Interesting to note that there’s no place for Marlon Harewood, even though I believe we could have taken up to 25 players.
Goalkeepers
Brad Friedel, Brad Guzan, Andy Marshall
Defenders
Curtis Davies, Carlos Cuellar, Nicky Shorey, Habib Beye, Eric Lichaj, Ciaran Clark, Shane Lowry
Midfielders
Steve Sidwell, Ashley Young, James Milner, Marc Albrighton, Fabian Delph, Stiliyan Petrov, Nigel Reo-Coker, Craig Gardner
Forwards
John Carew, Gabby Agbonlahor, Nathan