A below-strength Villa lose to Spurs and leave Dave Woodhall baffled.
Sometimes you think you’ve got football worked out. At its heart it’s a simple game – at the end of the match the team who’ve scored the most goals wins. At the end of the season the team who’ve got the most points wins the league. It really isn’t that difficult to work out. And then something happens to make you wonder if you really know the first thing about the game after all. Such as the team Unai picked to play Spurs.
It was, again, a fairly straightforward prospect. The weekend’s results had meant that if Villa won they would go fourth and the Champions League was a certainty, barring a massively surprising sequence of events from now until the end of the season. Winning would also push Spurs into even deeper trouble, which wouldn’t have much effect on the Villa but would be very funny, and make us a lot more popular with the rest of the country.
You could also throw in such intangibles as momentum and the feelgood factor going into Thursday night’s return with Forest. Pick the best team, fire them up with some well-chosen word of motivation and get the job done; simple.
Then came the team announcement. To be honest, I thought there’d been a mistake and the subs had been put up first but no, there really were going to be wholesale changes and a starting line-up weaker than the ones Unai has been picking for the League Cup. The sounds of puzzlement could have been heard for miles around.
Of course, picking a team like this doesn’t just mean that the players you’ve got on the pitch aren’t as good as the ones you might otherwise have had. It sends a signal to the other team that they’ve got a chance, to the players who are in the team that there’ll only getting a game because you aren’t fussed about the result and to the supporters that if you aren’t going to bother then neither should they.
The result was inevitable. Spurs were on top from the start of the match, scored two early goals and then managed to see out the rest of the game more confidently than Villa have done for a long time. Emiliano Buendia came on with five minutes to go and at least looked like he wanted to do something, pulling a goal back in the dying seconds. If he’d come on half an hour earlier, we might have even got a totally undeserved point.
I didn’t agree with Unai’s decision, but he’s the boss and he knows what he’s doing. I can even sort-of understand his decision; we’ve got another couple of chances to get three points, or however many we’ll need to finish fifth (not even the most unexpected scenario could see us getting anything at the Etihad on the last day) but if we don’t win on Thursday that’s it. There might even have been a bit of psychology in putting some relegation pressure back on Forest. I don’t know, and I doubt I ever will.
