Aston Villa polished off the final game of the season with an entertaining 0-0 draw against Valencia, showing some encouraging signs right before the new season, surely impressing the watching England manager, Fabio Capello. The only concern might be the lingering lack of a genuine threat in front of goal, Stewart Downing’s injury time free kick rattling the cross bar being the one true chance on target.
The early taking point, of course, was the unsurprising absence of a certain
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When Martin O’Neill says that you can often learn more from a defeat than a victory, as cliched as it’s become, he’s not wrong. Feyenoord put out a young side, we should of beaten them, we did. Benfica were a much tougher prospect and given the circumstances, they should probably have had the beating of us. They did. Comfortably. But did we learn anything?
Well, firstly, some perspective. Benfica are an extremely good team, they
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Video of each of the goals in last night’s 4-1 loss to Benfica in the Guadiana Cup. (One video for each goal)
10′ David Luiz’s pile driver takes a wicked deflection to beat Brad Friedel.
36′ Franco Jara hits another big shot from distance, Friedel parries, but Saviola is smartly following up.
43′ Óscar Cardozo sticks an unstoppable free kick into the top corner.
49′ Franco Jara drags the ball back at the byline, beating Curtis Davies and cuts it back to Saviola to
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Schooled.
Perhaps a little worse than I feared, but Benfica are a very good side and I figured they’d expose our weaknesses. Starting four forwards and a centre half with the ability to get forward like David Luiz, it was always going to be tough in the Algarve heat.
No excuses, we looked short on ideas, movement, quality, you name it. However, there aren’t too many sides in England that you could draw parallels to Benfica. Sure, we should
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Probably not the smartest thing to do, but on a whim I’ve decided to have a crack at pulling a live blog and video together. I’ve quickly thrown together a page which is very much experimental.
The video is a Veetle stream and it should be tuned to the right station already. If you don’t have it, you will probably need to download the Veetle plugin to see the video. Veetle produce what is probably the
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All the goals from last night’s Guadiana Cup match between Aston Villa and Feyenoord in the Algarve, plus the tie-breaking penalty shoot out which finished 4-4.
I’ll be back tonight with another live blog for the Benfica game, hopefully a little better prepared than last night when I missed Marc Albrighton’s screamer because I was under the impression the kick off was at 9.30pm… don’t know where I got that from… *cough* *cough* AVFC official site!!
Oh, speaking of the
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Just a quick post as I’ve just got finished with the live blog. That would normally serve as a reasonably good account of the game, but unfortunately I was under the impression that this game kicked off at 9.30pm, so I missed the first few minutes, including a 35 yard screamer from Marc Albrighton, and spent most of the first half trying to catch up.
I did get to see Marc’s goal in the half time highlights and it was
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Live blogging the Aston Villa vs Feyenoord Guadiana Cup match from The Algarve, Portugal later tonight.
Blog should be live with team news around an hour before the 9.30pm kick off.
Read the preview here. Hang around after the final whistle for the penalty shoot out.
Aston Villa vs Feyenoord – Guadiana Cup
I watched the opening game of the 2010 Guadiana Cup last night between hosts Benfica and Feyenoord which finished in a very entertaining 4-1 victory for the Portuguese side. They also followed that up with a 5-4 victory in a penalty shoot out.
Feyenoord opened the scoring just 3 minutes into the match with a breakaway goal that broke the offside trap laid by the extremely high Benfica backline and left a relatively simple finish one-on-one with Roberto in goal.
From
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