There are several key narratives going into Sunday’s game against Newcastle at St James’ and it’s tricky to establish any sort of order of priority. Firstly, I suppose, Kevin MacDonald’s presumably temporary, but possibly not, reign continues to breath fresh air into everything Aston Villa. Long may it continue and having steered a young, makeshift side to a result in the hostile cauldron – albeit of the mini variety – in Vienna, he’s unlikely to be intimidated by anything the Geordies can throw.

Threatening to overshadow MacDonald – and from what I’m learning about the man, he won’t mind at all – is the very real chance of new signing Stephen Ireland making his full debut. A prospect I think the overwhelming majority of Villa fans are licking their lips about.

Last, but certainly not least, is the continued emergence of Marc Albrighton. No surprise to us of course, we’ve known about his considerable talent for some time, but he’s gaining recognition from a wider audience now. The cat is well and truly out of the bag.

However, the key man for me in this is game is none of the above, it’s actually Ashley Young. I’ll come to the rationale behind that in just a moment.

Back From The Wilderness

Newcastle won last season’s Championship title in some style with 102 points thanks largely to keeping hold of a number of key players and the sensible stewardship of Chris Hughton. They might have lost Obafemi Martins to Wolfsburg and Michael Owen slipped out the back door, Bassong went to Spurs, Duff to Fulham and we nicked in for Habib Beye, but they retained a strong nucleus and haven’t added much to it yet as we head toward the end of the transfer window.

Going to Old Trafford for his first Premier League at the helm was something of a baptism of fire for Hughton and no trip to Utd’s home ground provides much of a barometer, but I’ve taken a quick look at their 3-0 loss to see if there’s anything to be learned ahead of our visit to St James’.

Utd pretty much dominated the game on Monday night, as you might expect, owning 66% of possession and a 70% share of the completed passes in the game. 3-0 didn’t flatter them.

Expecting the key battle, as is usually the case, to be in the centre of the park I focused on Newcastle’s midfield trio of Joey Barton and Alan Smith, sitting in the middle, and Kevin Nolan, playing an attacking midfield role behind Andy Carroll.

Of course, no team plays in a vacuum, the other team – and Utd in particular – will have a large influence on positioning and the role played in the game, but I’ve plotted out this central trio’s average position and heat maps in this graphic:-

The shirts indicate the players’ average position during the game and the coloured blobs on the pitch are based on their heat maps, all sourced from ESPN. I was surprised to see Barton getting forward more on average than Alan Smith.

With Danny Guthrie in a fitness battle, I would hope to see the Barton/Smith axis again at the weekend and therein lies the opportunity for Ashley Young in that space you see behind Barton. I’m now christening it “Ashley Young territory” and he’s going to have a field day in there.

If Barton can be sucked into a battle with Petrov, and I don’t imagine that will take much, Ash will lap up the space back there. Hopefully that will drag Alan Smith over to cover and you know who loves the right channel? Oh yes, new boy Stephen Ireland will be making a bee line for the box with Marc Albrighton as his wing man and Luke Young providing back up.

I imagine the early chances will fall to Carew and Downing at the back stick, both of whom could do with being a bit less wasteful when opportunity comes knocking. If we can grab the lead and exploit the extra space Newcastle leave chasing to get back on terms, I wouldn’t bet against Ireland getting one on his debut. He’s certainly motivated to make a point to his ex-employers.

AVC Preferred Starting XI

Unavailable

Carlos Cuellar may have declared himself fit, but the OS have placed him among a quintet of players unavailable for the Newcastle game along with James Collins, Steve Sidwell, Gabby & Andreas Weimann, whose ankle requires a scan to ascertain the extent of the injury.

History

It’s been a while since we last won at St James’ Park, in fact it’s been more than five years. You’ll definitely remember the game, it was 3-0 with JPA opening the scoring inside five minutes and Gareth Barry slotting away two late penalties.

No? Well, there was this little incident that might jog your memory:-

Could happen again. What odds on Joey Barton and his comedy moustache starting a fight with himself in the centre circle?

I just hope for a good result. It will be more difficult than West Ham, frequently tipped for relegation, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t come away with another encouraging performance.