The first thing I notice when I create the average position maps is whether our players were deeper or more advanced in comparison to the previous match; in this case the game against Tottenham. This is most noticeable among the back four and I was encouraged to note that they were considerably more advanced on average during this game, especially Carlos Cuellar.

I sang Fabian Delph’s praises on Twitter during the game, I sang them again in the first review and I’ll sing the same tune here. He and Petrov were the engine at the heart of the team that we’ve been missing so frequently. In fact, let’s take a look at their passing during the game:-

Fabian Delph		Stiliyan Petrov
40	Good Passes		37
1	Bad Passes		3
0	Shots (Blkd)		1
0	Interceptions		4
5	Tackles Won		2
1	Tackles Lost		3
1	Clearances		1
0	FK’s Won		2
0	FK’s Conceded		0

Numerical Advantage

I think that more is made of a player being sent off than should often be the case. Of course there is a numerical advantage, but we’re talking about 9 outfield players against 10. Alex Ferguson didn’t make any changes following Nani’s exit until half time when he swapped Paul Scholes out for Antonio Valencia. So we’re talking about the same back four, the same Wayne Rooney up top, but four across the middle against Villa’s five. Once Valencia was brought in for the second half, we were looking at a fairly conventional four man midfield from Man Utd.

Commentators frequently talk about “playing better with 10 men” which is patent nonsense, but they may well be trying that little bit harder to make up for the shortcoming. The plain truth is that it’s not exactly simple to make the extra man really pay off, you have to engineer the situation where you have an overlap while the opposition are putting in that extra 10% trying make sure you don’t.

If only football were as simple as 11 > 10.

Did Villa Also Play With 10 Men?

Slightly controversial perhaps, but I’ve looked as closely as I can at John Carew’s contribution when he came on in place of Fabian Delph for the last half an hour and I can’t see that he did very much at all:-

0 shots, 1 pass, 0 interceptions, 4 tackles, 1 failed clearance, 0 blocks, 0 free kicks.

Utd may have been reduced to 10 men for an hour, but based on what I saw during the game and those numbers, I’d say we weren’t exactly playing with the full compliment during the last third of the game either. It’s tempting to suggest that once Carew took to the field, we matched Utd’s 4-4-1 with our own 4-4-1.

Of course, MON wasn’t to know this, but it was only a matter of minutes after Carew came on for Delph that Petrov was forced to limp off, replaced by Steve Sidwell. As I said before, at that point we had 0% of the starting midfield central pairing and, to make matters worse, we apparently had John Carew doing very little himself. I’d have taken a 1-1 draw before kick-off, and based on this, I have to be happy that we took a point from the team that destroyed Arsenal just days ago.

The main statistics below show a very even game and whether Utd had 10 men or not, I’m really happy about that. Regular Statshack readers will no doubt recall that the stats belonging to the wins over Liverpool, Man Utd and Chelsea reveal games where we were clearly dominated by our opponents, but made our chances pay.

Once again, what I’m most encouraged about is the confirmation that a second holding midfielder, in this case Fabian Delph, really does provide the solid base for Gabby and the Wing3rs to work from. I hope we see a lot more of this in the coming games and we’ll see goals for sure.

1	Aston Villa	Feb 10th 2010	Man Utd	1
	48%	Possession %	52%
	10	Shots	14
	2	On Target	3
	1	Corners	7
	3	Offsides	2
19′ Cuellar		Scorers	23′ Collins (OG)
		Booked	Evans
		Sent Off	Nani
	296	Good Passes	340
	47%	CPS %	53%
	55	Bad Passes	68
	84%	Completion %	83%
	23	Interceptions	21
	49	Tackles Won	40
	26	Tackles Lost	25
	4	Blocks	3
	13	Free Kicks	12
Starting XI: 1. Friedel 24. Cuellar 2. Young 29. Collins 5. Dunne 19. Petrov 8. Milner 7. Young 6. Downing 16. Delph 11. Agbonlahor Subs: 22. Guzan 14. Delfouneso 4. Sidwell 10. Carew 15. Davies 23. Beye 17. Salifou
Average Position Map

[Original data and graphics courtesy of ESPN and The Guardian]