I know I should let it go, but inspired by the rarity of the recent 7-1 scoreline, I found myself wondering what scorelines we Villa fans have been treated to most frequently. Here’s a couple of highlights among the findings:-

Our five most popular scorelines:-

Maybe the increase in scoreless and 1-1 draws doesn’t surprise you, but there aren’t any losses among the top 5 under Martin O’Neill. Nice to see the 2-0 and 2-1’s ahead of the boring old 1-0’s too, right?

MON now has the dubious honour of being the only Villa manager to witness his side concede seven in a Premiership match. In fact, before the weekend, we’d never conceded more than 5 in the league. Of course, MON’s been on the wrong end of that scoreline too, but it may not surprise you to learn that DOL saw his side concede 5 twice, while Brian Little and Ron Atkinson also were also leader’s of Villa side conceding 5.

I looked at the distribution of goals scored and conceded by manager and rather than dump the full matrix, which isn’t massively interesting, I broke the scores into two categories: percentage of games where Villa conceded 1 or less goals and percentage where Villa scored 2 or more goals.

As you can see, O’Neill ranks a little behind BFR, BL, and JG defensively by this measure, but considerably ahead of everyone when it comes to scoring more than 2 goal at the other end. What that means, of course, is that you’re more likely to see at both ends during a match managed by MON than any manager we’ve had to date in the Premier League.

I’d never claim that entertainment value can be expressed by statistics, but it can’t be ignored that we’re treated to more goals under Martin O’Neill than other managers. However, that works in both directions and I found little entertaining about our 7-1 drubbing. Chelsea fans might have a different perspective.