With the pressure clearly on yesterday evening as Aston Villa hosted Rotherham United at Villa Park, eyebrows were raised with the starting XI Steve Bruce picked.
Not only did we see a return to two up top (to the delight of many), it was almost all change in defence again with players out of position.
Thankfully that didn’t bite us as we took a 2-0 victory with Tammy Abraham and Yannick Bolasie opening their accounts, but Mile Jedinak once again stole the show on a statistics front.
WhoScored gave our Aussie beard a rating of 8.32 – the highest out of both sides.
For a change, it’s nice to be able to reference a top ten when it came to good performances, as opposed to struggling for a top five and the following are worthy of a mention even if our Jedi was the main man.
John McGinn – 7.92
Jonathan Kodjia – 7.82
Ahmed Elmohamady – 7.75
James Chester – 7.50
Yannick Bolasie – 7.32
Conor Hourihane – 7.20
Tammy Abraham – 7.19
Jack Grealish – 7.17
Orjan Nyland – 7.16
According to WhoScored, only Will Vaulks got into a seven rating for Rotherham, so it’s not that difficult to summise what a difference actually setting up to attack can have on performances!
