“The richest game in club football” is almost upon us. A Look At What Villa Must Do To Win
Three Things – Fulham at Wembley, Championship Play-off Final
“The richest game in club football” is almost upon us. On Saturday 26th May – a date not without significance in Aston Villa’s history – we return to the national stadium for the first time since we beat Liverpool in that memorable FA Cup semi-final three years ago. I say the semi-final because I think it’s fair to say that although we won and were due back to play in the final against Arsenal, we spectacularly failed to turn up on that particular occasion.
Anyway, water under the bridge. Although it is more than a little crass to focus on the financial implications of this match, we find ourselves days from the biggest and most significant game of the past 36 years. A place in the Greed League is at stake, with the thick end of £200m ready and waiting to swell the club’s coffers over the next couple of seasons and banish Financial Fair Play concerns to the dustbin of history. Winner takes all, and the loser remains mired in the Championship, planning away days at Brentford and Wigan, rather than, er, Huddersfield or Bournemouth. Put that way, another season in the Championship suddenly doesn’t seem any less glamourous.
In all seriousness, we need to get promoted. Financially and in terms of our prestige, we need to get back to the top table and stabilise in the Premier League, before kicking on and getting back to challenging for European football again. We’ve already been left behind by former contemporaries such as Tottenham, Arsenal and Chelsea, so another year grafting Saturday/Tuesday over a 46-game season is not something we want in our future.
Standing in our way are Fulham, arguably the best side in the division behind Wolves, but tainted by play-off failure last season and by choking on the final day of this season, when a win at Small Heath – an away banker, surely? – would have seen them go up automatically by pipping Cardiff at the post. Instead, they collapsed to an acca-busting 3-1 defeat against one of the poorest teams in the division. I don’t think anyone would have begrudged them automatic promotion, but fail miserably they did, and now they’ve had to join us in doing it the hard way. As good as Fulham may be, I imagine they will be pretty comfortable having to play us rather than the one-dimensional Middlesbrough.
Historically, we are very evenly matched – in 68 previous encounters, Villa have won 23, as have Fulham, with 22 drawn. Since the year 2000, we’ve met 30 times, with Villa winning 11 to Fulham’s 8, with 11 drawn. Although the ‘Cottagers’ have won five of the last eight matches, and the last draw was back in 2013. History suggests a draw this time out (over the 90 minutes at least) while recent form suggests a victory for Fulham. What can we do to ensure that doesn’t happen?
1. Work our a**es off
Fulham enjoy controlling the football, averaging almost 60% possession throughout the season, the highest in the Championship. They are lightning fast, they pass – and keep – the ball well (83% passing accuracy, again, a league high) and they score plenty of goals – 81 in their 48 games to date, 61 of which have been from open play.
We need to try and disrupt that flow. We are not by nature a pressing team, but when we do (as evidenced against Wolves, for instance), the results can be spectacular. Although defensively we are extremely well-organised and hard to break down, we don’t have the pace to take on teams like Fulham on the counter and need to keep the ball ourselves as much as possible. We have the players to do this – Grealish, Adomah and Hourihane, for instance, are excellent on the ball and bringing others into play.
The likes of Chester, Terry, Jedinak or Whelan don’t want to be getting into foot races with Fulham’s lightning-fast danger men Sessegnon and Ayité, while Cairney and Johansen are no slouches either. So it will be in our interests to keep the ball as much as we can and press Fulham all over the pitch to stifle their quick tempo approach.
2. Stop Mitrovic and Sessegnon
Ryan has been a revelation this season and is the club’s leading scorer with 16 goals.
Since his arrival in January, Newcastle outcast Aleksander Mitrovi has breathed new life into his career in England and Fulham’s promotion challenge, hitting 12 goals in 17 matches as Fulham came within a whisker of automatic promotion. Stopping these two will be vital to our chances of winning this match.
I would expect Alan Hutton to be given the reducer job on Sessegnon, and if he can find room in his pocket alongside Adama, we’ll have every chance of getting the job done. Similarly, Terry and Chester need to be on their best form to shackle the rejuvenated Mitrovic, and there is no reason to doubt that they will be. Those match ups will be a fascinating sub-plot.
I’d expect the more mobile Glenn Whelan to start alongside Conor Hourihane in the middle of the park – with Fulham a purer footballing side than Middlesbrough, we can expect far less aerial pressure. Winning their respective match-ups will be key as well.
3. Youth vs Experience?
On the evidence of the season as a whole, Fulham are better than Aston Villa. We both had poor starts to the campaign, but over the last 30 games, Fulham were THE form team in the division – Fulham’s record was W21 D6 L3 compared with Villa’s W17 D6 L7.
But form counts for nothing in what is effectively a one-off cup game, and there is surely a case to be made for Fulham’s stutter at the send of the season (losing to Small Heath and the first leg of the play-off with Derby), as well as the relative experience of the two teams (and their managers).
Steve Bruce wrote the book on promotion, and there is a particularly long chapter on promotion via the play-offs. Jokanovic? Not so much. And let’s not forget they bottled it in the play-offs last season and choked on the final day of this. He did achieve promotion with Watford back in April 2015 but had only taken over the previous October and was gone before the new season had started.
Our squad has a number of experienced international footballers, players who have graced the biggest tournaments in football, and one man in particular has won pretty much everything at domestic level.
John Terry, James Chester, Ahmed Elmohamady, Glenn Whelan and Mile Jedinak (and to a lesser extent, Alan Hutton and Robert Snodgrass) have clocked up massive experience internationally and at Premier League level, but when I look at the Fulham squad, I see plenty of youth, promise and quality, but not a great deal of knowhow and nous. Of course, every young team has to start somewhere, but on the biggest stage, I can’t help feeling our experience might be the difference.
Whatever happens on Saturday, we’ve come a long, long way from the dark days of 2016. Although I am pessimistic by nature, I have felt all along that we will finish the job this season – I just think we have got this. The togetherness of the squad, against a backdrop of horrific personal turmoil for Steve Bruce, has shone through as the stakes have risen. One last effort is required on Saturday to get us over the line, and I am sure we will do it. Of course, I will be devastated if we lose and fall at the final hurdle. But all I ask for – all any of us asks for – is for the lads to leave it out there on the Wembley pitch.
I can take a defeat if that is what the fates decide, but what I can’t take (and I’m sure I am not alone) is going down with a whimper. I don’t want to see a QPR or Norwich performance, where we were poor from the off and never looked like getting anything from the game. Please boys, give us 100% commitment and effort. Do this for yourselves. Do it for Brucie. Return this national institution to its rightful place.
The time has come for the lion to roar again.