Bournemouth are next up at Villa Park.
It’s Sunday, which now means football, and for a change nothing about Middle East wars, religion or two-tier anythings. Two teams kick off and at the end of the match Villa have won. That’s how it should always be; everything else is an irrelevance.
This time it’s Bournemouth who have the privilege of visiting us. They’ll bring more supporters than we had in the away end on Sunday and they’ll probably be as noisy. They’re doing annoyingly well so far this season but history shows that such things don’t last and this is where their slump begins.
Bournemouth are owned by some American firm who’ve got an actor as a shareholder. They don’t intend to build a stadium they couldn’t hope to fill, neither do they think that an entire region’s transport budget is going on a tram stop outside and have no plans to turn a toxic waste dump into the Las Vegas of Europe, so the similarity ends there. They do, though, have a manager who came second in a Unai Emery lookalike competition. It was won by Unai’s identical twin brother.
Apart from that they’ve still got Tommy Elphick as first team coach. It’s a strange thought that a lot of our supporters won’t have heard of the man who damaged more goalposts than Scotland at Wembley and even less will know why Andy Lochhead will be looking down and smiling. I’ll make a wild guess that Harvey Elliott won’t be starting. We’ve got another injury and a couple coming back, which means our midfield will be on form again. As will the rest of the team, because this is the day when everything goes right and we show the rest of the world how good we are. It’s a pity that the rest of the world won’t be looking at Villa Park anymore, but that’s life.
