Dave Woodhall watches Villa go down at Spurs.
It’s not been a particularly good week so far. After getting knocked out of the League Cup without so much as a whimper cane a trip to Spurs, perhaps more than any other the club who, wherever we’ve got a decent team we judge ourselve against, and when we’re struggling we bemoan the fact that we’re not as good as them. When we’re good, bad or indifferent, we always seem to trip up when other results have gone our way and so, with Saturday’s results providing the opportunity to put some distance between us and the other Champions League contdeners, there’s always the likelihood that we’d blow the chance in the most spectacular way.
The team was back to full strngth after the ‘experimental’ side that lost to Crysal Palace, Matty Cash was there to give the Spurs supporters something to get upset about and the bench was as good as we could have hoped for. The game started off brightly as well, with Villa content to let Spurs have the ball and hit them on the break.
This tactic worked when Morgan Rogers scored from a Lucas Digne corner after 32 minutes. Amadou Odama had hit the post not long earlier and Ollie Watkins missed a good chance to double Villa’s lead, so the feeling at half-time was that the job was half-done and finishing it off in the second forty-five was more than possible.
Unfortunately that wasn’t to be. Four minutes after the restart Spurs got an equaliser then Unai Emery made the mistake of replacing Rogers with Jhon Duran, changing the formation and as a result surrendering much of the shape that had seen Villa through the first hour. Spurs got two quick goals to win the match and a fourth in stoppage time to set the seal on an afternoon that had started so promisingly and ended in such disappointment.
Unai will be the first to admit that he got it wrong in the second half. In that respect managers are like goalkeepers – they get the blame for defeats but rarely take the credit for a win. Then again, he’s allowed the odd ricket and he, like everyone else, will no doubt learn from the experience. There will of course be comparisons made with Martin O’Neill and the retreat from Moscow, but there are more than enough differences, not least that O’Neill’s team was comprised on the whole of youngsters and reserves whereas Wednesday night’s international-studded selection should have been more than enough to beat Palace.
We’ve still hit nothing like top form and a few players have yet to reach the heights of last season. Leon Bailey has gone backwards, Jadene Philogene has yet to show that he can succeed at this level and perhaps Douglas Luiz and Moussa Diaby are being missed more than we might admit. And yet, despite all this we’re still well in the hunt for a place in the top four and with a good chance of being top of the Champions League at the halfway point. There are worse places to be.