Lille are coming to Villa Park again.
The ridiculous amount of matches you play in Europe now means that the old idea of having a week off between legs has gone and we’re playing Lille for the second time in eight days.
That means amongst other things that there isn’t a lot to say about them. I doubt much has happened to them since last Thursday apart from winning away at the weekend. They’ve been to Villa Park before so we’ll know what to expect from their supporters. A bit of noise, very likely a flare or two smuggled in but none of that steward-attacking some other hoodlums have got up to. We’ll probably treat them better than we got over there as well.
Their players are the same as last time while we should have a couple back, although this is the Villa so there’s still time for relapses and new arrivals in the Bodymoor High Dependency Unit. Unai will probably play a strong team and maybe, for once, Ollie Watkins will have a night off.
The prices are the same stupidly high levels we’ve had to put up with all season and there seems to be a lot of tickets still on sale so we could be in for a smaller than usual crowd. But we’ve said that before this season and had near enough forty thousand in the ground so who knows?
We won one-nil in the first leg, which should be enough but this is the Villa we’re talking about and history shows that when we think we’ve done the hard bit we’ve usually managed to make the rest even harder. And to make it even more worrying they got beat one-nil in the away leg last round. That, though, wasn’t against the Villa. We’re due another European Glory Night and although Lille are hardly one of the great continental names, beating them will put us on the way to a bigger one.
