Dave Woodhall enjoys Villa’s good form continuing.
A strange thing happened on Saturday afternoon. Walking towards Stourbridge’s 3-2 win over Ilkeston (just to make me feel at home they were coasting to a 3-0 win until letting in two late goals and having to hang on at the end) I wished I was on my way to Villa Park. For much longer than I want to think about, Saturday afternoon has been something to dread from one week to the next, so much so that matches shifted to another day come as a relief because I could enjoy a full programme of football without the attendant horrors of knowing that Villa are getting beat.
Now though, I’m looking forward to the next match, and the one after that, and the rest of the season. It feels good to be a Villa supporter again. Friday night’s trip to Brighton showed the reason why. They’re one of the form teams of the Championship with ten games unbeaten including a 5-0 thrashing of Norwich. It was undoubtedly Villa’s bigegst test so far. I said last time that anything we got from this one would a bonus. And not only did we get a point, we should have got all three.
Villa dominated the game from start to finish. A goal from Nathan Baker put the team in control, an equaliser right on ther break that they couldn’t do much about would have been the cue for a second half collapse six weeks ago – and for most of the previous five years. The response from Steve Bruce’s Aston Villa was to come out after the interval as though setbacks are there to be overcome, they took the game to the home side and in the last ten minutes they were as dominant as they have been for a long while. Only the woodwork and Brighton keeper David Stockdale prevented Villa, and in particular Jonathan Kodjia, from scoring the goals that would have shown the true difference between the two sides. But despite ‘only’ getting a point that’s now six unbeaten and Bruce deserves every one of the accolades he’s receiving.
It’s strange to think that you can look to the future with such confidence after a weekend that sees the team slip to sixteenth in the table but you can’t watch a performance like that and not think that Villa will be much higher before long. We’ve got a run of home games between now and the New Year that are not only all winnable but we should be disappointed with any other result. Even our away fixtures, difficult though some of them appear, can be approached with confidence. Brighton are second on merit and to have outplayed them on their own pitch shows that Villa don’t have to fear anyone.
A final point – Friday night, Christmas on its way and a 360 mile round trip to a match that’s on TV anyway. Villa’s first ticket allocation sold out immediately, we ended up with a record number of away supporters inside the ground and they dealt with some horrendous traffic problems both before and after with good grace. Some clubs’ fans claim to be the best, most loyal in the world so often that they sound desperate to prove it to themselves. We don’t say a word. We don’t have to prove a thing. We just know.
