Villa got off to the worst of starts in Vienna tonight. 15 seconds. That’s all it took for Rapid Vienna to take the lead.
From kick off they ran into Reo-Coker in front of the back four forcing the ball to be spread out to their left. The ball was whipped in early and it fell neatly on to the head of Jelavic to nod in. I say ‘fell neatly’ mainly because Curtis Davies was flat on
If you’ve seen the squad that Martin O’Neill is taking to Austria then you know that he’s taking this tie seriously. Then again, when I looked at who he left out, this squad must have practically picked itself. Luke Young, Bouma, Downing, Harewood are all injured and Salifou has been sick for a while.
Obviously we’re all looking for both a performance and result from this game, it’s important that the team bounce back from the opening day debacle.
Aston Villa have just announced a 22-man squad to travel to Austria for Thursday’s Europa League tie against Rapid Vienna. Interesting to note that there’s no place for Marlon Harewood, even though I believe we could have taken up to 25 players.
Goalkeepers
Brad Friedel, Brad Guzan, Andy Marshall
Defenders
Curtis Davies, Carlos Cuellar, Nicky Shorey, Habib Beye, Eric Lichaj, Ciaran Clark, Shane Lowry
Midfielders
Steve Sidwell, Ashley Young, James Milner, Marc Albrighton, Fabian Delph, Stiliyan Petrov, Nigel Reo-Coker, Craig Gardner
Forwards
John Carew, Gabby Agbonlahor, Nathan
Aston Villa have been drawn against Rapid Vienna for the Fourth Round Europa League and will play the second leg at Villa Park.
Rapid entered the competition the Second Qualifying Round and have beaten Vllaznia from Albania 8-0 (agg.) & APOP of Cyprus 4-3 (agg. AET). They qualified for the tournament by finishing runner-up to Red Bull Salzburg in last year’s Austrian Bundesliga.
Before I list the draw in full, I should correct something I said in an earlier post.
Here are all 76 teams entered in today’s Europa League Fourth Qualifying Round split into their seeded & unseeded groups. Villa are seeded and will be drawn against one of the teams from the bottom, unseeded group.
The Play Off Round will be played over two legs, home and away, to be held on 20th & 27th August 2009.
Seeded teams
Werder Bremen (Ger)
Lille OSC (Fra)
Aston Villa (Eng)
Villarreal (Esp)
Everton (Eng)
Athletic Bilbao (Esp)
AS Roma (Ita)
Club Brugge (Bel)
Partizan Belgrade (Srb)
PSV Eindhoven (Ned)
Heerenveen (Ned)
Hapoel
The draw for the fourth and final round of qualification for the UEFA Europa League will be made on Friday and it will define Villa’s first action in the tournament. UEFA competitions can often seem pretty complicated at first glance, but I find that they’re a lot like those old 3D magic eye images in that if you stare at them long enough, eventually they just fall into place.
I don’t want to count our chickens, but I’m going to
Actually, nothing overly interesting here, just the opportunity to use a cheap innuendo.
These are the balls Aston Villa will be playing with next year… fnarr fnarr!! On the left is the Europa League ball and the one on the right in the new EPL ball, which, if it’s worth having an opinion on, I’d say is a bit ugly.