A hundred and sixty-eight hours on the Astonian express.
On Monday we officially announce that Yasin Ozcan has joined us and is staying with Kasimpasa for the rest of the season. Why we couldn’t have said that a week ago, no-one knows. The Fa Cup fifth round draw takes place and after the successful exorcism of Bert Millichip’s ghost we’re at home, to Cardiff. Anwar El Ghazi’s happy about it and so, probably, are Calum Chambers and Callum Robinson.
Then Austin McPhee is appointed assistant manager for the Portugese national team. He’ll be staying with Villa and doing both jobs, which might make going home for lunch a bit tricky.
Semi-automated offside technology is set to be trialed in the FA Cup fifth round, which would normally be of no concern to us but this year we’ll be available to get stitched up.
We’re opening a new shop in the Bullring. This despite the failures of shops in the Pavilions (now Europe’s Biggest Primark) and New Street. This time it will be different, honest. For a start we’ll be selling special, souvenir, limited edition Ozzy Osbourne replica shirts at £120 each. We seem to be on the verge of going a little bit overboard on this one.
Name from the past time – James Chester has announced his retirement, six years after he put his career on the line by playing for us when he should have been on the sick. Service like that should never be forgotten.
The cup match with Cardiff is being played on Friday night. we haven’t got matches on consecutive days yet, but it’s getting close. Just as well we’ve got such a big squad and never, ever get injuries.
There’s a lot of stats worked out about matches now, sometimes about matches years ago, but there’s one thing that has never been worked out. How often do Villa drop points when it’s raining? It always seems that when the weather’s foul we play badly and the match with Ipswich was another one. It started off sort-ofish okay then Boubacar Kamara became the latest central defender to go off injured and the team slipped back into the old ways of indecision and hesitation. We didn’t do much until Axel Tuanzebe got sent off five minutes before half-time and then we had a couple of chances before the break. In the second half we switched off again and three defenders watched as one attacker got to the ball first.
After that we started to play with a bit more urgency, particularly when Marco Asensio came on, and Marcus Rashford’s free-kick rebounded off the bar nicely for Ollie Watkins to make up for the chance he missed before and after his equaliser. We even had enough chances in stoppage time to win but as ever, the opposition keeper had One of Those Days. We proved again that we can’t do it on a wet Saturday afternoon in Aston, it was still raining after the match and the second train to New Street was cancelled five minutes before it was due into Witton, which was good of West Midlands Rail.
The women’s team have lost again, 3-0 at Leicester.
