After a poor hour on Saturday where Aston Villa welcomed Everton back to Villa Park, the final 30 minutes turned into a total rollercoaster for fans.
Following the introduction of summer signing Leon Bailey, Villa exploded into life and we scored three quick goals through Matty Cash, a Bailey inspired Digne own goal, before Bailey then got himself on the scoresheet properly.
We could’ve scored more, we probably would have had Bailey not seemed to injure himself when scoring and he looked happy enough at the full time celebrations which gave everyone hope.
He can certainly feel himself hard done by as the impact he had on the match should’ve seen him named alongside right back Cash, who made it into Garth Crooks’ Team of the Week feature.
David de Gea (Manchester United)
Matty Cash (Villa), Kristoffer Ajer (Brentford), Gabriel (Arsenal), Thiago Silva (Chelsea)
James Milner (Liverpool), Mateo Kovacic (Chelsea), Jesse Lingard (Manchester United)
Sadio Mane (Liverpool), Ivan Toney (Brentford), Ismaili Sarr (Watford)
Writing his feature for the BBC, Crooks said of Cash’s performance – and first goal for Villa since his Nottingham Forest switch.
“If you’re going to score your first goal for your club, you might as well do it in front of your home supporters, make it memorable and be on the winning side. Matty Cash managed to do all three. This lad is a decent defender but it’s the first time I’ve seen him drive into the opposition’s penalty area with goals on his mind. This is a right-back who finished brilliantly with his left foot. This was an excellent performance by Villa and not before time. They’ve been very ordinary until now.”
We’ll ignore Crooks’ ‘ordinary’ comment as I can only presume he’s oblivious to the issues we had over the pre-season campaign, and that this was the first time we could call upon almost a full squad of players but the finish against Everton was exactly what we need to aim for moving forward as offensively we haven’t even been ‘ordinary’ we’ve been woeful.
If this is where the group begins to click properly, it could be an exciting season and we should see players in Crooks’ thoughts far more often – as simply put, every Villan knows where we need to improve and there’s a lot to improve on given the start to the season we’ve had.
EFL Cup - Chelsea
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Draw
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