Villa beat Southampton as Dave Woodhall keeps a weather eye out.
I’ll start with a hypothetical question – if Villa hadn’t won on Wednesday and we were playing a team above us in the table, would this game have gone ahead? Or might someone have had a word with someone else and the safety of the travelling public been declared paramount?
But we had a confidence-boosting midweek victory against Brentford and the visitors to a storm-tossed Villa Park were Southampton, looking to emulate such notable teams as Derby County in 2006, Sunderland two years earlier and our very own almost-record breakers of 2016. The match was very much on.
Villa had a changed side with the defence completely revamped and Jhon Duran starting. That’s what you have to do when there’s two games a week and it’s something we’re still adapting to. There was certainly a tentative start to the game as both teams adapted to the conditions and if the visitors had been a bit sharper there were a couple of occasions when Emi Martinez might have had to do something to keep occupied.
There was a preview of what was to come when Boubacar Kamara picked up on a loose ball in the Southampton box but neither Duran nor John McGinn could get a clear shot away. Then a long ball out of defence bounced perfectly to allow Duran to run through a couple of the visitors’ defenders to score his first goal for a few weeks.
If they’d known then what they know now I’m sure a good few of the crowd would have gone home at that point because there wasn’t much else to get warmed up by although Villa did look impressive at times. Morgan Rogers had chances either side of half-time where he could have done better and Ollie Watkins again wasted a couple of opportunities after coming on.
Indeed, that Unai Emery made four substitutions with more than half an hour to go showed that El Maestro knew the game was won and he was more concerned with resting some players and giving minutes to others than he was with the threat of an equaliser. In the end, not only was this as comfortable a one-nil win as you’ll ever see, it was another three points to put Villa back into the top six, which is more or less where we deserve to be based on what’s happened so far this season.
It wasn’t perfect by any means; Villa waste far too many chances, much of the midfield is too inconsistent and we’ve lost the ability to counter at speed that contributed to our success last season. Normally we’d be looking to put that right in January but the Stop Aston Villa Being Successful regulations that have been introduced in the past couple of years mean we’ll have to make the most of what we’ve got.
A couple of other points – it was good to see Cameron Archer get a decent reception even if he didn’t get much opportunity to show that we were wrong to let him go and I wonder how many of the empty seats were down to season ticket holders preferring to stay at home than risk the vagaries of the local transport system. And so we move on.
