I think we’ve touched on this in the past, but one of the weaknesses of our current system when we play two strikers is that it can leave Petrov a little over run. Perhaps I was hasty in wondering whether his mind was elsewhere and maybe he just had a tough game. Either way, he wasn’t able to stamp his usual authority on the game.

Let’s start with a graphic showing the two systems against each other, and this is an interpretation of the average position maps by the way:-

As you can see, Wolves were more or less employing my favourite 4-2-3-1 formation and the two holding midfielders, Karl Henry and Adlène Guédioura, provided that strong platform for the 3 more attack-minded midfielders to operate from. That gave Petrov a lot of work to do and he wasn’t able to express himself in his usual manner.

Compare his passing charts and heat maps from this game against Wolves with the previous game against Wigan:-

Stan made more passes against Wolves than Wigan (29 vs 21), but you can clearly see that he’s pinned into a smaller area of the pitch. I don’t mean to single him out for criticism and I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that he’s the core reason for our failure to win, but the data seems to back up my impression that he wasn’t really at the races today. Maybe he operated in a more conservative role under instruction, I would certainly imagine that was the case for the second half carrying a yellow card, but it’s equally possible that the Wolves system simply forced him to operate in a more constrained manner.

As for the team statistics, they give the impression that we at least edged it, but I felt that we were in more control than the numbers suggest. That said, we had an awful lot of shots that didn’t give Marcus Hahnemann anything to be worried about and if a few of those could have been on target, we would almost certainly have come away with the three points.

2	Aston Villa	Mar 20th 2010	Wolves	2
	51%	Possession %	49%
	20	Shots	7
	3	On Target	3
	7	Corners	5
	0	Offsides	0
16′, 82′ Carew		Scorers	23′ Craddock, 38′ Milner (OG)
Petrov		Booked	Guedioura, Zubar
		Sent Off
	264	Good Passes	199
	57%	CPS %	43%
	64	Bad Passes	76
	80%	Completion %	72%
	18	Interceptions	2
	35	Tackles Won	27
	17	Tackles Lost	26
	1	Blocks	4
	13	Free Kicks	11
Starting XI: 1. Friedel 24. Cuellar 25. Warnock 29. Collins 5. Dunne 19. Petrov 8. Milner 7. Young 6. Downing 18. Heskey 10. Carew Subs: 22. Guzan 14. Delfouneso 4. Sidwell 12. Albrighton 2. Young 23. Beye 47. Clark
Average Position Map

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