Aston Villa head coach Dean Smith was looking to make a fans’ dream come true earlier tonight and lead his side into the Wembley based Play-Off Final. All that stood in our way were local rivals West Bromwich Albion, but we did have a narrow advantage from a 2-1 victory in the first leg.
We again dominated the game, creating far more than they did and had the greater possession but with them sitting back and being allowed to foul at every opportunity by the referee, it’s simply joyous to say that even though Craig Dawson scored 29 minutes in to level the tie, they didn’t have a prayer.
Our performance gave them one though as our own deficiencies were on show despite our dominance of the game. When it counted they choked or Jed Steer became a hero (I go with the latter) as we went to penalties and 4-3 later, they were crying again.
No doubt Jack deserved to be sent off for something as they wonder why they play such defensive football having appointed the likes of Tony Pulis and Alan Pardew, and sacked the bloke who actually wanted to attack.
Boing boing bog off.
(There’s a bit of bravado here and a fair few drinks, it wasn’t that easy – we have to be better!)
Speaking to the BBC following the fulltime whistle, Smith said of the game.
“I’d have taken this 15 games ago and we have cause to be very proud. We deserved it, but the disappointing for me was not winning. I couldn’t believe we’d lost the game. That’s our first defeat since losing at Brentford in February. They were always going to be threat from set-pieces but we had enough chances to have scored ourselves. We’d done our preparations though. We had prepared for penalties since the day we qualified for the play-offs. We had a lot of rehearsals and of course we had the inspired substitution of bringing on Mile Jedinak, who has never missed a penalty.”
