Critical next 5 games

[Dave]

Couldn't really find a suitable place to put this, but it finishes by talking about the next few games so here will do. F365's club "mood rankings"

4) Aston Villa (17)

It’s already been a season of two halves for Aston Villa, which is a decent effort really when we’re not even a third of the way through the thing.

For six games it really was bleak, the disappointment at how last season ended bleeding into a moribund start to this campaign, one in which five of their first six games ended either 0-0, 1-1 or a 1-0 defeat with the one exception a 3-0 paddling from Crystal Palace.

It really did look and feel like something coming to an end. A bold and often brilliant attempt to disrupt the established Premier League elite under the astute leadership of Unai Emery, a manager who really quite recently found a club battling against relegation back to the Championship.

Didn’t feel at all right that it might happen with nothing tangible to show for it, Villa having bollocksed some pretty presentable trophy opportunities, including but not limited to last season’s FA Cup and the Europa Conference League the year before – a competition not even West Ham had managed to West Ham up.

But now, 10 games and eight wins later? All is once again well and the positive vibes are there for all to see. They’ve started beating decent teams in compelling fashion, even if the two defeats during that run are curiosities – against mid-crisis Liverpool in the Premier League and at Go Ahead Eagles in the Europa League.

That Europa League defeat feels particularly incongruous, sitting as it does between deserved wins over Spurs and Man City in the league but also in stark contrast to what we think is in fact responsible for turning Villa’s season around.

European football can be a curious beast. It can be both benefit and burden, often in the same season and occasionally even at the exact same time.

Villa and Newcastle are not remotely the same club, but they are essentially trying to achieve the same thing: muscle in on the big boys’ turf. And we really don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that they keep alternating Champions League status at the expense of both each other and whichever Big Six clubs happen to be in the process of fumbling about at that particular time.

Newcastle are doing perfectly well in the Champions League, but its toll is already visible on their doom-spiralling league form. And ‘success’ in a competition you have no realistic chance of actually winning isn’t really worth it when your domestic form suffers.

Villa, by contrast, are in the very winnable indeed Europa League which changes everything. There is not the same stress or toll on the same group of players. There is greater scope for personnel changes and the greater possibility that success in one competition boosts the other rather than the reverse.

We’re not saying Villa are better off out of the Champions League, because who knows how different their summer might have looked had they made it. There’s also the financial implications of which tournament you’re in, which for Villa – who continue to fly close to the PSR wind – are more significant than their rivals.

But missing out on the Champions League isn’t all bad. Spurs fans were widely mocked for ‘celebrating’ their Arsenal-scuppering defeat to Man City that may have cost them a Champions League place. A year later, they won the Europa League.

There really is absolutely no reason Villa can’t go and do the same this season, and even if they don’t the Europa League has already had a positive kick-starting effect on their season. That divide between the bad and good parts of their season to date sits conveniently but not coincidentally on the moment their Europa League campaign began.

And there really is every chance for things to get better yet, with Leeds, Young Boys, Wolves and Brighton to come in the first couple of weeks after the international break, before what does admittedly look like an absolute tw*t of a December where they have to play Man United, Chelsea and for some reason Arsenal twice.

[eye digress]

And there really is every chance for things to get better yet, with Leeds, Young Boys, Wolves and Brighton to come in the first couple of weeks after the international break, before what does admittedly look like an absolute tw*t of a December where they have to play Man United, Chelsea and for some reason Arsenal twice.

Glad they mentioned this - thought it was just me who thought it weird we were playing both fixtures in the same month, and before (unless I'm mistaken) we complete the full round of ties.

Still, that December run looks like the kind of series we generally do better than expected under Unai. If only we can pick the low hanging fruit first...

[eamonn]

Does the 17 in brackets mean we're one of the moodiest/grumpiest in the league? I know Brummies form the bulk of our support but come on, I'd say we're collectively enjoying Villa life since Guillem Balague's book came out and turned our form around.

[Somniloquism]

We were in the last rankings where we were 17th, now 4th so mellowed after the release of the book.

[eamonn]

Go William !