Another seven days of mystery and mayhem.
The latest little sign that all is not well is the story that Lee Preece, who’s been at Villa longer than the North Stand, is to leave. When people like Lee want to move on, something’s not right.
Then comes the next step of our record-breaking quadruple-winning season. Wycombe away is about the least interesting League Cup tie we could have had, not only because it’s played on an industrial estate at a ground that fits in with the surroundings but also because we seem to play them all the time. For this one there’s no fickle supporters and nobody arguing with the team, just a set of unknowns and debutants that hasn’t been matched since we played Liverpool in the cup. There was a time when picking such a team would have the manager burned in effigy but now it’s accepted.
Emi Buendia is a welcome sight in his first start in forever and although it wasn’t a dream return he did score with a neat header in the second half. Jhon Duran won and scored a late penalty then Wycombe got a stoppage time goal because we don’t do clean sheets. Into the next round without much fuss and with no injuries; that’s really all you can hope for from the League Cup third round. Talking of which, if Wycombe is the most uninteresting trip you can have, then Palace has got to be up there with the home draws that don’t set the heart pounding. But that’s who we’ll be playing in the fourth round. It’ll be £25 apparently.
John McGinn’s out for a couple of weeks, which isn’t good news and Emi Martinez has been banned for two internationals for dicking about with a trophy again, which is bad for Argentina but not necessarily for us. The club are heavily plugging tickets for Bayern, which is strange considering they were saying last week that it was our quickest sell-out ever. Then you notice that it’s hospitality tickets they’re punting out, you see the prices and you realise why. One day they’ll look out of the window and realise that bit of water they can see is a canal, not the Thames.
There’s a bit of good news on Saturday when Harry Kane goes off injured for Bayern but don’t worry, because no matter how serious it looks, a player we’re due to come up against will always make a miraculous recovery. Then the week ends with a trip to Ipswich. Villa, as usual, give the opposition a goal start then begin to play. Morgan Rogers equalises, goal machine Ollie Watkins puts us ahead and with the game wrapped up we start to look ahead to Bayern. Trouble is, Ipswich don’t see it like that. They should have had a player sent off and that should have been the match won but they get on top and another defensive cock-up leads to an equaliser. If you’re not going to win make sure you don’t lose and all that, but we have to be winning these sort of matches.
