Villa’s start to the season – reasons to be cheerful (1/2)
The new season has barely begun but the pause button has already been pressed. The first international break is upon us. I am as patriotic as the next person, but England games leave me cold.
Too many false dawns, too many coulda/shoulda/woulda moments: I no longer go out of my way to follow the Three Lions. Of course, I wish them well and it is heartening to see Tom Heaton and Tyrone Mings upholding the best traditions of Aston Villa representing the national team. We are now second only to Tottenham (78 v 75) in terms of players who have been selected to play for England, an impressive statistic considering some of the dross we have seen down B6 over the past 20-odd years.
I digress. We are four games into our return to the ‘Promised Land’ but we have an underwhelming three points to show for it. One win, three defeats. Did we expect better? Should we be sitting higher in the nascent table, having spent the thick end of £140m this summer?
I am firmly of the view that to produce (or at least, take much notice of) a League table before at least 10 games have been played is frankly ridiculous, but it’s a sad by-product of the times. The pundits need some frame of reference from which to magic up their guff and for the time being, it means we find ourselves in the bottom three.
The talking heads and naysayers who were convinced that we would “do a Fulham” are sitting there smugly, basking in our stuttering start to life back among the so-called elite. The perceived wisdom is that the table never lies, but surely after only four matches, we can reserve sensationalist judgement and wild over-reactions?
Enough football has already been played to allow us to form an early opinion on where Villa might be heading this season. Dean Smith’s remodelled Villa are beginning to take shape and we now have a much clearer idea of his preferred first-choice players. With this in mind, let’s discuss reasons for hope and, in a later post, some of the more worrying trends which have begun to emerge.
Reasons to be cheerful – Part One
The partnership between Tyrone Mings and Bjorn Engels has been perhaps the most eye-catching feature of our season so far. From a tough opening against Tottenham, they have looked stronger and stronger with every passing game. Mings’ form has been such that he has received his first international call up for the latest Euro 2020 qualifiers.
This might sound strange when we have lost three of our opening four matches, but I’ll come to that shortly. Mings and Engels have an innate understanding of each other’s positional play and look as if they have been playing together for years, not weeks.
There is every reason to believe that they will become the latest in a long line of Villa centre-half partnerships, in the finest traditions of Mellberg and Laursen, McGrath and Teale, and Evans and McNaught, to name a few.
Reasons to be cheerful – Part Two
Despite the uninspiring results and League position on paper, the reality is that we have been competitive in every game so far. We haven’t been blown away by superior opposition and we led last season’s Champions League finalists at their place until the last ten minutes.
While we have been roundly punished by our mistakes, I can’t help feeling that we have been the victim of circumstance. For instance, leading Tottenham 1-0, John McGinn had a very, very strong claim for a penalty turned down.
Tom Heaton had a hugely uncharacteristic brain freeze in the opening moments of his home debut and we were two down minutes later with a mistake from Douglas Luiz which was punished by a huge deflection off Mings. Bournemouth should also have been reduced to ten men in the first half with the persistent fouling of already-carded Philip Billings, who lost his head to such an extent that he was substituted by Eddie Howe at the break, before he could be sent off.
Not to mention the farcical end to the game at Crystal Palace, where despite playing poorly and down to ten men, Henri Lansbury was denied a last-gasp equaliser by one of the worst refereeing decisions of all-time.
In every match, we have competed and we have continued to display the resilience which dragged us into the playoffs last season – we could (perhaps should) have got something from every game so far.
Reasons to be cheerful – Part Three
The fans. More than 30,000 season ticket holders, selling out away matches in minutes – the fans are the proverbial 12th man, and then some. The atmosphere at Villa Park against Everton was widely acknowledged as one of the best in living memory, and there is no doubt it played a huge part in seeing us over the line in that match.
The feelgood factor since the playoff final, the new faces in the squad and the resilience the team have shown under Dean Smith all make for a potent cocktail and are huge positives going forward. We are a club again and the disconnect between fans and players has all but disappeared.
So while there are areas from which to take heart and positivity, there is also cause for concern, which needs to be addressed if we are not to get bogged down in a relegation battle at this early stage and I will consider these in the next post.
In the meantime…
