Villa beat Wolves on an afternoon of high emotion, as Dave Woodhall reports.
It was a memorable day for a lot of reasons, most of them good ones. The tragic news about Gary Shaw overshadowed the build-up to the game and the tributes were both heartfelt and deserved. The flag, the programme cover, his family and team-mates on the pitch beforehand, the applause before the game and on eight minutes, all were worthy of the occasion but perhaps the most fitting of them all came before kick-off.
Brian Little, a man equally loved by Villa supporters, laid a wreath at the McGregor statue to the player who he said took over his number eight shirt and took it to another level. One legend whose career was cruelly cut short by injury paying tribute to another; that Gary always said that his predecessor as also his idol added even greater poignancy.
On such a day the spirit of Ron Saunders always looms and Unai Emery paid his own accidental tribute by fielding a virtually unchanged team, Diego Carlos replacing Lamare Bogarde with Ezri Konsa moving to right-back. Villa got off to a poor start and there was no real surprise when Wolves went a goal up after Carlos gave the ball away with a pass that was never going to reach its target.
For the second week in succession Villa were a goal down to relegation candidates and they were fortunate not to have gone two down, as they did against Everton. An improvement was expected in the second half, if only because Villa couldn’t have got much worse. Ian Maatsen and Leon Bailey came on to make the eam more inventive going forward but there was little improvement until the arrivals of Ross Barkley and particularly Jhon Duran.
Rarely has a player’s introduction caused such a stir and it’s happening in every game. Seventeen minutes to go Duran won the ball and laid it off for Morgan Rogers to split the Wolves defence, enabling Ollie Watkins to follow on from his first goals of the season last week with another one. He’s truly up and running.
Villa’s resilience now matches Wolves’ flakiness and a winner was inevitable, although I wish we hadn’t left it so late. Youri Tielemans had had a quiet game by his own high standards but with two minutes to go he hit a deep cross for Ezri Konsa to somehow bundle over the line while trying to avoid Diego Carlos.
There were thirteen minutes of stoppage time and after four of them Rogers squared the ball for Duran to get yet another goal, although he was probably disappointed that it was ‘only’ a tap-in. 3-1 was probably an unfair scoreline given that the overall performance was so disappointing, although the art of grinding out wins with such displays is what champions are made of.
If we’re going to improve on, or even equal, last season’s success Villa will have to tighten a defence that can still look stretched even against such limited opposition. The imminent returns of Tyrone Mings and Boubacar Kamara will help but the rest of the team need to step up. In the best possible way, though, I hope it’s a long time before we have another afternoon like this.