It’s midweek, it’ll probably be raining and it’s a 7.30 kick-off, which at least means getting home half an hour earlier. It’s a bit cheaper to get in than most of our matches, which means it’s still expensive but we’ll get the best part of forty thousand there, so you can’t really complain. And we’re playing Brighton.

Like most teams beginning with ‘B’ in the Premier League, Brighton have been shite for most of their history. They almost went out of business, hawked themselves around the south coast looking for a new ground and finally got one. They also got another ten thousand supporters and began thinking they were our equals, or something equally ridiculous.

Like the other B teams they’ll eventually go back to where they belong and so will their supporters, which in their case will be in front of the TV watching the team they’ll say they’ve always supported because they’ve got an uncle who once lived in Manchester/Liverpool/north London. Some of them will be at the match then go home and make hilariously, not at all racist, comments about the surroundings of Villa Park. They won’t have bothered looking at the church or Aston Hall.

Their owner plays poker and gambles for a living, but then again so did Tony Cascarino. They’ve got a Head of People & Culture, which may or may not be what the rest of us calls HR. Their manager looks like the sort of bloke who’s the reason why toilets in Broad Street bars have got older blokes in there hawking aftershave. He’s also the youngest manager in the Premier League, ever, and talking of age Danny Welbeck’s still there. He’d be considered old but for one thing.