It’s Spurs at home on Sunday. A nation expects.
Most of the time Villa don’t get as much attention as we should. We don’t usually inspire much feeling one way or the other from other teams’ supporters. It’ll be different on Sunday evening at the unfeasibly ridiculous time of seven pm, though.
This time, apart from those with deluded hopes of Champions League qualification and a few from the lesser areas of Birmingham and its environs, the whole country will be wanting us to win. We are, for ninety minutes, everybody’s favourite other team. And we’re not even Newcastle.
The reason, of course, isn’t much to do with us and everything to do with the opposition. Tottenham Hotspur, relegation candidates and poster boys for hyped-up style over substance. It’s usually easy to dislike Spurs, but now it’s a lot easier to laugh at them. Most of the time you could have a bit of sympathy for supporters getting shafted by incompetent owners. Not here, for reasons that have been explained time and again but can be summed up in two words – it’s Spurs.
They’re on their fourth manager in twelve months, which is good going, and whether they’ll make it five will probably depend on how quickly they can appoint his replacement. No doubt we’ll be looking at their team to see if we can revive the old tradition of signing players who did well against us them got relegated. One of them is Conor Gallagher, and the only bigger dodged bullets are the ones that are fired at Donald Trump, or maybe not. They’ll have the best ground in the Championship, until the PieintheSkyDome is built.
Our team will be the usual collection of highly-motivated world-beaters, who will all have been passed fit and are raring to go. And now for the serious bit. We’re in the middle of the most important week for years and we’ve got to win the next two matches, no excuses. Forget the recent inconsistency and any potential big game nerves, win this one without breaking sweat and look forward to Thursday and another huge night.
