Five things we learned from Aston Villa 1 West Brom 0:
1) Linesmen can suffer hallucinations: Herd and Olsson were grappling prior to the free-kick which led to the penalty and Phil Dowd spoke to them both. Thus, when the ball did come in, everyone in the ground was watching the two of them tangle and only the linesman had been on the magic mushrooms.
2) Darren Bent is a luxury we can’t afford when down to ten men. His motus operandi is to avoid touching the ball except when passing it into the next from about six yards out. This is (sort of) okay when we have 11 because at the end of the season he has 20 goals in 40 games (and who else is going to score many?). But with ten men, having Bent is like having nine men. Strangely McLeish didn’t change anything after Herd went off, I would have subbed Bent for a midfielder and played 4-4-1 with Agbonlahor up on his own.
3) Villa still can’t defend corners: Up until the Man City away game, it looked like McLeish had sorted out the defending of corners that had become our Achilles heel under Houllier (and that perversely Houllier spoke of not addressing until the summer). When we conceded a couple of goals from corners at Man City, we all thought perhaps it was because Collins was out injured. However, it turns out that we still have big, big problems. Conceding a corner is almost like conceding a penalty.
4) Villa still can’t score from corners either: Remember under O’Neill when Martin “brave as a lion” Laursen would attack every corner and we were the best team in the league at set pieces..? Other teams might have had better players but (a bit like Stoke now) we were the team to fear at set pieces. I can’t recall the last time a central defender headed in a corner for us. (I remember Collins heading in a set piece shortly after the drinking episode last season.)
5) We haven’t replaced Downing after all: Surely he will come good eventually but so far N’Zogbia hasn’t shown anything of his Wigan form. No goals and I can’t recall any assists either. As someone who really wanted us to sign him, it’s really worrying that maybe he doesn’t like being out on the right wing (but we can’t shift Gabby who is our best (outfield) player by a mile this season).
