Villa Boing The Baggies In Spite Of Predictable VAR Performance – Match Stats

Mike Field

3 years ago

Categories: Match Stats, The Villa Match Zone

Having celebrated our first draw of the season in our last game against Burnley where we did everything but score, today’s derby clash with West Bromwich Albion was about one thing only – winning.

Bragging rights, keeping the stripey bags quiet, three points from a game in hand and getting Sam Allardyce off to the perfect start were also all on the table. We didn’t, however, welcome back Ezri Konsa or Ross Barkley sadly.

It was a typical derby really, we all knew Big Sam’s main tactic would be kick Jack, so it played out how most of us thought.

Five minutes in Anwar El Ghazi gave us the advantage, ably assisted by Bertrand Traore, whose first half showing suggested he had finally found his groove with us. Plenty of possession, some great passages of play, but with only five efforts at target – and one at goal – we needed to do a lot better in the second half, although defensively we were sound as come the break they’d only had one effort themselves and were down to ten men after a horror tackle (on Jack) from Jake Livermore.

It was a great start to the second half, with chance after chance coming our way and we should’ve been long clear before Ollie Watkins scored a perfectly good goal only for the utter idiots at Stockley Park to decide that being level to a square ball obviously now means your left testicle has to be offside.

It was a good reaction from the players as well as they drove forward even harder after yet another shambolic decision.

Albion predictably came more into it after that and in what was possibly the best spell of possession they had, we broke, and Traore capped a fine performance to make it 2-0.

We weren’t done yet though, Jack broke through again and was hauled down in the box and Anwar El Ghazi made it 3-0.

It was rumoured at this point that VAR had self-combusted out of frustration at us not crumbling.

Job done, onto the next one.