Give Me Some Blind Faith

To be honest, I’ve become quite apathetic towards Villa over the past few weeks and there have been a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the action on the pitch has hardly been inspiring: the team seems to lack direction and it’s unclear exactly how the players are going to go about winning football matches. Also, the constant bickering among Villa fans has become extremely tiresome. We all support the same team and want the same thing so why are there so many arguments?

The truth is that our start to the season has been mediocre. Considering where we were eighteen months ago, we should be content with that for now. The next few games will define our season; we’ve played nearly all of the big boys and now it’s time to take points off the teams around us.

Just the other day, I found myself wishing I still had the mentality I had when I was a younger Villa supporter. Nowadays I study all the stats, pick apart each player’s performance, analyse ability and mentality, ponder players’ best positions, fret about formations and wonder what would suit us best. It all becomes quite tedious and trying to discuss such things with other fans just leads to disagreements. When I was younger, I didn’t care about our last ten games and I didn’t care about how many goals a player scored for the team he played for before joining Villa. I just supported the team wearing claret and blue and believed those players could, and would, win. Each week brought a different game and another chance to win.

Why have we all become managers? Surely the things we all worry about and look at week in, week out are things that managers should concern themselves with. Why do we stress ourselves out over these things? It’s football, it’s a game. Why don’t we just go to the matches and enjoy them for what they are? Why can’t we believe in our team no matter who is playing or which team the Villans are playing against. Why do we insist on looking for information that fills us with doubt before each match? It’s no wonder our home support is so quiet when we’re all convinced we’re going to lose before we even get there!

I miss blind faith and hope. I miss believing we can beat anyone. I miss loving the players despite how badly any given one of them played five matches ago. The sad thing is that we could still be like that: we don’t need to know all the stats, we don’t need to depress ourselves every week in the lead up to games. This Aston Villa team can beat any other team; we’ve seen that already. Why don’t we just turn up and believe we can win? Then, maybe, that belief would wash onto the pitch.

No two games are ever the same, no two performances are identical. Anything can happen in any match. That’s why it is the beautiful game. Why do fans keep looking for reasons as to why Villa won’t win? Equally, why look at the past to suggest what might happen in the future? It’s daft. It’s like copying last week’s lottery numbers for this week’s draw!

I know people seem to hate anyone who has blind faith in the team but I think we need some blind faith back. A bit of hope and belief certainly wouldn’t go amiss.

If the team was doing terribly and hadn’t won all season things would obviously be different and the emotions at Villa Park would have to be massively different. However, things are not that bad we’ve seen an improvement on how things have been, even if the quality of football hasn’t been great recently.

We’re Aston Villa and we can beat anybody! I don’t need any stats to tell me that.

Thank you for reading.

Related

5 comments

  1. Quiet home support?? I don’t know where the hell you must be sitting?? Blind faith was good when I was young because blind faith didn’t cost £45/50 a game to watch millionaires underperform and fail to do the one thing every single 10 year old can do up the park… score a goal!

  2. Surely nobody is “Looking for reasons as to WHY Villa won’t win”? It’s all there for us to see, we aren’t very good. The wins have been fortunate, played Arsenal at the right time when they were in the press for all the wrong reasons, City should have put another 7 past us and we are thankful for their hopeless defending and Norwich are dire. The other games….well….TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE. We have not improved football wise, other sides have become worse and that’s another fortunate thing for us.

    What on earth have the Villa become to play 8 defensive players against a side with no strikers?? It’s preposterous. I will not waste another £1 on watching the type of football I can watch locally in the Ryman League.

  3. lol the absolutely deluded positive and the absolute negative always make me laugh when i see them on forums.

    in reality only a child or a clinically insane person deals in absolutes. The world is not black and white. its gray a million shades of it.

    I totally understand where you coming from ADZ, that is the villa supporters core coming out in you.
    but in the age of instant gratification and the internet. there will always be a voice for dissent. its as much of a good thing as a bad.

    Jon,

    ha i honestly don’t believe you are serious- you can’t keep credibility in tact when you post on a villa site that we should not have won the games we won and we deserve to lose games.
    I don’t know many football fans who actively want to see their team fail!

    considering we are 13th right now – to state that there are 7 other teams are that have played worse than our “terrible terrible terrible ” is a bit of a stretch.

    We are a mid table team right now, last season we were a relegation battler.
    but there are 28 more games to go so lets not go for the rope just yet.

  4. Well written Adz, keep the faith, I have supported the Villa for almost 60 years; good, moderate, awful and diabolical, I have had great times following them in Europe from Yugoslavia to Bilbao, I also enjoyed going to Shrewsbury, Halifax Chester etc. in the 70’s.
    Don’t let the moaners get to you, they were there in ’81 and ’82 when we were in our pomp beating the best in Europe, keep the faith and I wish you as many good times as I have had.

Leave a reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Latest posts

Google search engine

Categories