No one should be surprised that Aston Villa have been able to name their squad under the new “home grown” rules well ahead of today’s deadline as it was as straight forward as it can be. I took a look at the squad back in July and listed 23 players who would have to be named under the new rules. Since then, James Milner and Nicky Shorey left, Stephen Ireland joined, so here’s the 22 player who were left and named today:-

Goalkeepers: Brad Friedel, Brad Guzan.

Defenders: James Collins, Carlos Cuellar, Curtis Davies, Habib Beye, Richard Dunne, Eric Lichaj, Stephen Warnock, Luke Young.

Midfielders: Stewart Downing, Jonathan Hogg, Stephen Ireland, Isaiah Osbourne, Stiliyan Petrov, Nigel Reo-Coker, Moustapha Salifou, Steve Sidwell, Ashley Young.

Strikers: Gabriel Agbonlahor, John Carew, Emile Heskey.

I make that 15 home grown and 7 non-home grown players, but I’m on the fence about whether Lichaj is or isn’t home grown. I think he probably is, but either way, it’s no big deal for us.

Of course, we can use as many of the under 21s as we like, they do not have to be named in the squad. I listed 12 players in July that we might call on (the first three being established first team members now): Marc Albrighton, Nathan Delfouneso, Fabian Delph, Andreas Weimann, Elliot Parish, Shane Lowry, Barry Bannan, Ciaran Clark, Nathan Baker, Chris Herd, James Collins, Harry Forrester.

So that’s a total of 34 players I’ve named here, but we’re highly unlikely to see the likes of Nathan Baker, Chris Herd or James Collins (striker), let along Harry Forrester, who I can’t honestly say why I’ve even included. Seems a bit arbitrary, but I’m sure I had my reasons at the time.

If you’re worried about numbers, you probably don’t need to be, here’s the number of players we’ve used in the Premiership over the last three seasons:-

• 2009/10 – 23
• 2008/09 – 21
• 2007/08 – 22

As we know, outside of a core group, there were many players who didn’t actually see much time on the pitch, so there’s plenty of scope for rotation.

We’ll be fine.