When the Villa might be playing Chelsea.
Boxing Day should be the one game of the season where football really is a family occasion. You take your dad for his annual outing to moan about the price of everything and how the players these days are nothing like they used to be and pass the hip flask he smuggled in round at half-time and go home saying he’s never going there again. It certainly shouldn’t be starting at five thirty for the benefit of the television audience so that your entire day is based round getting to the match. Whether it should be played at all in the current circumstances is another thing entirely and the fact that with less than 24 hours notice we still haven’t got a clue whether it’s going ahead or not is the biggest farce of all.
We used to invariably lose on Boxing Day then do well on New Year’s, but we’ve won for the past three seasons. If we do get the opportunity to make it four in a row Steven Gerrard won’t be there to see it, and neither I daresay will a good few of our supporters, either through illness, or worry about catching something, or perhaps because getting back from Villa Park at this time is just too difficult. Still, what’s a few inconvenienced punters compared to a TV-paying audience?
Chelsea are our opponents, and as always they’ll be bringing with them some charming supporters and an over-inflated sense of self-importance. There’s not much point going on about how they’ve bought every trophy they’ve won, because it’s happened and the rest of us have got to accept it. We still haven’t got to like it though. They’ve got Ross Barkley, further proof that the better your debut for the Villa the worse the rest of your time here will be, and one of their many players out on loan is Danny Drinkwater, further proof that you don’t have to have a good debut for us to be crap the rest of the time either. You’ll also see the strange phenomenon of a couple of thousand supporters traveliing on a day when there’s no trains and there won’t be many coaches either. Trust us, it’ll happen.
Don’t know if the game will take place, don’t know what kind of a team we’ll be able to put out, not much point in predicting the result. Might as well say we’ll win then.
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