All you really need to know about Saturday’s fixture against Norwich City is that Aston Villa won. Winning 2-0, we bagged the three points. This is obviously a huge positive, but just how happy should we be?
My opinion is that the match itself had very little of interest. Even to the most interested football fans in the stands, the game was, all in all, fairly boring. It was a simple scrap between two very poor sides, with the Villa boys proving that they were less bad than Alex Neil’s Canaries as opposed to better than them.
On top of this, we are still eight points away from safety with thirteen games to go. All it takes is a look at our fixture list to realise that eight points is a killer mountain to climb. I hardly think a win against a below average relegation rival is reason for unbridled optimism or a result that has sparked survival hopes.
What’s going on off the pitch is equally terrible. The way Aston Villa Football Club is being run is a complete disgrace: adding people to the board will only work if they are the right people. Tom Fox and Randy Lerner have run this once-great club into the ground. They need to go.
You may have noticed temporary agency stewards walking around the stadium during Saturday’s match. Essentially, this is our board’s misguided way of saving money, potentially shaving tiny amounts off the expenditure column by replacing the staff the club is built on, the type of people who have worked at Villa Park for decades, with temporary staff who don’t know what they’re doing. This is happening when we have underperforming players and players who don’t actually play earning tens of thousands of pounds a week.
Perhaps the only other positive came off the field when Gabby Agbonlahor’s ill-advised comment about journalists in his post-match interview caused mild amusement. In fairness to the player, his comment was at least truthful and, considering I don’t rate him as a great goal-scorer, his finish was actually reasonably good.
What do you think? Are you feeling positive or negative? Have Saturday’s points given us a fighting chance of retaining our Premier League status or are they, as I believe, simply a bonus on the road to relegation?
Football is about what happens on the pitch but without money a club in the Prem is at a disadvantage , but given the amounts of money just to buy & pay players getting a sugar daddy who can regularly stump up the cash is getting harder as many clubs have found . But there is money if you know whee to look & Hollis & King with their contacts could be the people to find it so perhaps they just need a little time to do so
But what about the footie and what has been a rare sight of late a Villa win ? It requires two teams to have a match and if one team is low on confidence as Villa have been & the other as poor as Norwich of course the patch might not satisfy the purists wanting to be entertained by some exciting footie. But one of the reasons Villa have lost games is not because of lack of skill but rather that other teams have learnt that if you bully Villa they surrender . But it seems the team is learning & even Carles Gil earnt praise for his defending ,as despite his skill on the ball he has been very weak defensively . However since there was talk of him being off loaded in the January window despite him being one of our most skillful players he seems to have realised that we need him in defense as well as attack .
But what of attack ,well we scored 2 & conceded none which perhaps is significant . But yes there were a couple of scares and in the first half particularly aided yet again by poor reffing which allowed Villa’s advantage being turned to Norwich’s despite Villa being the ones sinned against
But what of the goal scorers? To me Gabby , despite his extra pounds , looked fitter than he has been for quite some time & with more game time he could well shed some of those extra pounds & be the threat we’ve missed for some time . As for Lescott he scored & that’s what matters , but what is perhaps more important was his influence on the game as even without the armband it was he & not our team & club captains who controlled how we played . And that is some thing that has lacked from Villa for a very long time .
Can we survive ? Mathematically we still can even if many pundits say not , & on present form it could be the Baggies,who if they continue their current downward slide could be the team to replace us in the bottom three