This is really pretty cool. Imagine an online version of a book or magazine, but an interactive version where the pictures can actually be video, additional content such as data table can be expanded and links can be included to external content. I recommend using the button in the bottom right to go full screen and have fun exploring. I did find some of the video content a little buggy, but that may have just been me.
I’ve been meaning to get to this for some time and as transfer hungry fans start rolling out the old memes, such as Martin O’Neill “has taken us as far as he can” and is “useless in the transfer market”, it seems as good a time as any. I want to put the last few seasons, and especially 2009/10, in a larger context so that the progress and trend can easily be seen by everybody. So it’s time
I seem to remember mentioning the Castrol Football Index a couple of months back as I had hopes that I’d be able to use it as a regular feature here in addition to the Actim Top 100 Index. Unfortunately, Castrol only post updates once a month, usually a couple of weeks in arrears, so it’s not been current enough for me to use as I hoped.
However, I like the way it works and they’ve just posted the final update
I’ve been mucking around with the Actim Top 100 Index for a good few years now: I used to publish regular updates in an old forum before Aston Villa Central existed. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb type of measure.
Someone once asked me whether the Villa players generally do so well because they play so many games. The short answer is yes.
However, they still have to do the business on the pitch
I haven’t had chance to get an End of Season Review post out for a little while, so I’m throwing this one in as a “quickie”. If you’re expecting to find Aston Villa at the bottom of this squad rotation table, you won’t be disappointed. If you feel so inclined, you could take a quick glance at the tables for the previous two seasons first. You’ll find that 2009/10, on this basis, was an improvement. Not
Here’s a little statistical curiosity which helps flesh out the picture I’ve been painting recently of relativity. Go back to February 10th and take a look at the table which shows the records of teams against clubs in the top half of the table only. We were second behind Chelsea ahead of our game against Man Utd, which was a draw and left our position intact.
Here’s the same table at the end of the season:-
Team
Pld
W
D
L
F
A
GD
Pts/Gm
Pts
Chelsea
18
10
3
5
40
18
22
1.83
33
Man Utd
18
10
3
5
28
19
9
1.83
33
Tottenham
18
9
4
5
25
24
1
1.72
31
Man City
18
7
5
6
30
24
6
1.44
26
Arsenal
18
7
4
7
33
26
7
1.38
25
Everton
18
6
7
5
30
31
-1
1.38
25
Liverpool
18
6
5
7
19
20
-1
1.27
23
Aston
I recently mentioned in flippant fashion that League attendance was down a little at Villa Park this past season, but since we had more cup games – leading to 2 trips to Wembley – and less European matches, I thought it worth looking at overall attendance this year.
Despite falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League, Villa Park still played host to 25 games this season, compared with 27 in 2008/09. When you consider that somewhere in the
As part of the 2009/10 Season Review, I thought it wouldn’t be bad idea to actually list all 52 games that Villa played during the season in order. I’ve highlighted the scores of the games that we lost – there’s only 11 – and provided links to Statshacks where available. There’s some summary statistics at the bottom. Plenty more coming, I’m just a bit slow getting to it.
It’s taken a little longer to pull this post together
A. 1933
Huh?
Simple. We finished 6th the last 3 seasons in a row. The last time Aston Villa achieved 3 back to back seasons finishing in the top 6 of the top flight English league was 1933. 2nd in 1930/31, 5th in 1931/32 and 2nd again in 1932/33. We all know that we’ve done better than 6th on many occasions since then, but we haven’t managed to string three top 6 seasons together. Until now.
Some people