Travelling to Brentford, and trying to travel back.
After the continental break it’s back to the league and the joys of a trip to London on the Sunday before Christmas. It’s probably a bit less fraught than London the Saturday before Christmas but don’t bet on it.
Brentford. Another club to find out that TV money and sponsorships mean you don’t have to have lots of supporters, or indeed many supporters at all, to do well in the Premier League. Just keep signing players for a pittance, sell them on for serious money and you’ll do fine. It’s so simple I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t do the same. We’ve helped them by buying a defender (good), midfielder (came via non-league and left before he could do too much damage) and a couple of forwards (one good, one indescribably awful) off them as well as giving them compo for a manager. That probably paid for a fair few breezeblocks and bits of cladding in their new ground, which is much the same as all the other new grounds built by clubs who get ideas above their station. Their old ground had a pub on each corner; progress isn’t always good.
We’ve got Douglas Luiz out suspended for a match and they’ve got a forward who’s suspended for eight months because the FA finally decided to punish him for what he did years ago. In a decade or two they might get round to doing the same thing to Manchester City.
Our record against Brentford is unacceptably poor and that has to stop right now. We are the mighty Aston Villa, which means nothing can hold up our progress, least of all a nondescript club from a part of London that’s close enough to the centre to be eye-wateringly expensive but not close enough to be interesting. Getting home afterwards might be a bit different.
