As the season grinds to a halt.
The bull outside the Bullring has got some clothes – a Villa shirt to mark our new shop opening. It gets a bit of publicity, which I suppose is what we were hoping for.
The Villa awards dinner takes place, and at £474 a time the food had better be good. Youri Tielemans wins Player of the Year, Morgan Rogers gets Young Player and John McGinn won Goal of the Season for his PSG escapade. Robin Olsen got a special award for leaving and Chris Heck made a speech thanking everyone for everything. It seems he has a heart, after all. And probably rents it out at extortionate rates.
He also says we’ve go a few more commercial deals, the North Stand plans have been approved and Witton Station is being upgraded. Those last two have been around a bit but this time it’s for real. Really.
Potentially good news on the midfield general front as John ‘The Oracle’ Percy reports that Boubacar Kamara is in talks about a new contract. He says the same about Youri Tielemans and Tyrone Mings.
Pepe Reina’s retiring. He played for us a few times, if you remember.
Meanwhile, at the Bordesley Green Palace of Varieties, the ringmaster praises how well we’re doing and says he wants to compete with us in Europe. Remember kids, Just Say No.
Unai speaks before our Sunday day with destiny. Tielmans is back and he won’t be listening out for the other results.
Which is probably just as well, otherwise he’d have been as suicidal as the rest of us. For the second time in a couple of weeks we saved our worst performance for the biggest match. We should have made a volatile atmosphere even more unbearable for them from the off, but instead we started badly and gradually got worse. Still, almost half-time, no real harm done and we surely can’t be as bad after the interval. Then Matty Cash plays a bad backpass and Emiliano Martinez has a World Cup winner-sized rush of blood.
Into the second half and the news from the north-east is good. We’re getting close to what we set out to do, victory is in sight and it looks a lot closer when Morgan Rogers picks up on a mistake from their keeper. Unfortunately Thomas Bramall, a name to rank in infamy alongside O’Leary, Hopkins and Hodge, decides to have a brainstorm.
They go up the other end, score a couple of minutes later and get another late on as we’re chasing the game. We were so bad that we didn’t deserve anything, which John McGinn admits straight afterwards, but that’s not the point. Yet again VAR, which was brought in to help reduce the number of refereeing mistakes, is shown to be inconsistent and it could cost us far more than next season’s Champions League revenue.
Before the team get back to Bodymoor a letter has been fired off to complain. It won’t do any good but at lest it shows that we’re not going to be walked over anymore. Perhaps we might start being as militant about PSR. /strong>
