There’s been better ones.
The week starts with Juventus tickets going on sale, followed by the not-entirely-predictable-oh-no saga of the ticketing website crashing. Then all the normal seats have gone in seconds but there’s plenty of the posh ones left. Just another ordinary day in the life of Aston Villa.
There’s a bit of film released showing the team training in Belgium. Jhon Duran doesn’t look very happy so the word is that he’s bound to be causing some massive unrest in the squad. The word, of course, from anyone who spends their life looking for problems.
The international squads start to be named. Apart from the usuals Pau Torres is in for Spain, Enzo Barrenechea gets his first call-up for Argentina and oh, oh Youri Tielemans is out of the Belgian squad because he’s injured. You know what that means.
After a pleasant day touring the lace shops and canals of Brugge it was time to get down to the serious business of watching Villa attempt to go back top of the Champions League table. Or it would have been, if the match had been anywhere near as memorable as the rest of the trip.
Our pretty much full-strength team laboured against one of the poorest sides in the competition. They weren’t much good at all but we hardly matched them and neither side looked like scoring. It was one of those games that you knew would take either a mistake or a flash of inspiration to settle. It took a mistake and if you’re going to make one it might as well be a big one. As it’s Tyrone Mings, though, he’s forgiven. All in all a night best forgotten, but we’ll have to do better next time to finish in the top eight.
Our attempts to emulate the Big Clubs continues with the annoucement that we’ve got a vodka partner, whatever one of them might be. As long as we earn a few quid I don’t suppose there’s any harm.
And so to Anfield, which isn’t really the sort of place you want to be going when you’re playing like we are. And to be fair, we didn’t play that badly. We got beat, which was expected, and we had a stonewall penalty turned down, which was also expected. That apart it was a big improvement and with a bit more luck and a different ref we could have come away with a point.
We ended the week ninth in the league and if we’d held on another ten seconds against Bournemouth we’d be third. We’re also eighth in the Champions League; without Mings’ error we’d be third in that as well. That’s how pointless it is to be setting much store by league tables at the moment. Saying that, it’s not been a good couple of weeks and this is where the manager starts proving how good he is.
One bright spot; it might have gone under the radar and it might only be in League One but Louis Barry scored for Stockport again on Sunday That’s eleven already this season. And the week ends with a Villa team travelling up to Old Trafford more in hope than expectation and getting a pont. Well done the womens team.
