The Brazilians call it ‘where the owl sleeps’. For the Spanish, it’s ‘where the spiders nest’. For Emi Buendia, it’s football heaven, the furthermost corner of the furthermost goal in Europe. Stick it over the bar and it’s heading to Asia. Not that there was ever any doubt for our diminutive diamond. The net bulged, the away end heaved and it was in that moment that we knew. We bloody knew. To quote the late, great Brian Clough’s commentary in 1982, ‘we’ve done it’.
In every season, there are certain goals that hit different.
In 2024, it was Leon Bailey’s late smash into the Arsenal goal away at the Emirates. Not so much limbs, as bodies, phones, glasses, small children and grown adults contorting in all directions. And we were just settling back down in glee when Ollie turned prime Poborsky, lifting the ball over a hapless keeper and we did it all again with bells on. We roared, we left our own bodies and we believed. Champions League awaits for me. Villa is a big club mate.
In 2025, it was Jhon Durán. That’s a good ball played in by Pau Torres, oh and it must be, and it is. Bayern Munich. One-nil. It’s happened again. The visceral roar. The mad-as-a-box-of-frogs Columbian, capable one week of frustrating you tripping over his own feet, the next of lifting the ball into the net with his first touch from halfway back to Moseley. We left with smiles on the Holte End steps that wouldn’t be wiped off faces for weeks.
And in 2026, it was on the banks of the Bosphorus, that the floods of tears broke through. The first goal had brought celebrations of belief. This one brought celebrations of disbelief. Limbs flailing. Eyes wide with wonder. Heads shaking at what glory thine eyes had just seen. Falling forward in the tidal wave, hauled back upright by friends who were there with me in Rotherham, Barnsley and Ipswich. And were there again in Rotterdam, Bologna and now Istanbul. Dozens of us together through thin and thinner, now lifted by the certainty of a trophy lift on its way. Fire up the engraver, our name will be forever etched in this glorious moment.
There are lots of things that can make you cry. And when they’re all mixed into one moment, it’s a glorious release. The joy of this 25-yard curler for a start. The 30 years of hurt. The echoes of the Holte Enders in the sky. We all have them, the people who turned us claret and blue. They say you don’t choose Villa, that Villa chooses you. But it’s not just the club, it’s the people who help make that choice for you. The neighbour, for example, who used to pile us into his van every other Saturday to go and visit his mate who just happened to live in a Witton Lane terraced house. ‘Didn’t realise there was a match on today, officer, we’re just parking on his drive to say hello’, John would say, alongside me in my Villa shirt. Or my great-grandad, whose ashes were scattered on the Villa Park pitch, the day after a game in the late 60s on what was described to me as being ‘like a potato field’. Not like the bowling green pitches of today. And most of all, my Dad. Claret and blue mad. The scarf doesn’t fall far from the Holte End.
My second-ever Villa memory was 26 May 1982. Wednesday night, wisely Mom was out. The novelty of a live football match on the telly in the corner of the living room. A glorious shin finds the net, and there’s a visceral roar I hadn’t heard before as a seven-year-old. I turned to my Dad’s favourite armchair, only to wonder where he was. Why was it empty? Where was that guttural noise coming from? And then he came back in to land. Arms aloft, mimicking the mass of bodies in De Kuip, Rotterdam. Dennis lifting the big one. I didn’t know any better, I just assumed This Is What We Did.
I’ve done both sides of my family tree. And throughout the 1800s on my Dad’s side, there were whole generations hatched, matched and dispatched in Aston church. Too poor to have a gravestone in the churchyard, but listed forever for this Villan to find in the census records. I think of them whenever I turn the church corner now, to see the Holte pub and ground rising up into the sky. What would they think, to see that now? My ancestors who might have gathered to see Queen Victoria open the Aston Lower Grounds in 1858, or visited on a rare day off to see the boating lakes. Hard workers who could only dream of spending the little money they had left on the ice skating rink in the bitterly long winter months. People who caught wind of how the Lower Grounds cricket pitch was going to be turned into a football pitch. And who would have been there when Aston Villa F.C. moved in from Perry Bar in 1897. They’d have seen the horses going past their windows as the Holte End banking was first formed and the Trinity Road stand first rose from the foot of the Aston Hall hill. They’d have spoken of Villa’s founders Jack Hughes, Frederick Matthews, Walter H. Price, and William Scattergood. They’d have heard of William McGregor’s plans to launch a first-ever football league. They’d have been stirred by George Ramsey’s successes.
And in Taksim Square’s torrential rain, they were all there. Not just 20,000 Brummies drinking the place dry, but every single one who came before us. Chose us. Raised us claret and blue. And your badge Dad, pinned to my scarf. Yippee Aye Ay, yippee aye oh, this one’s for you Holte Enders in the Sky. This Efes from a bin filled with ice. This claret pyro that isn’t so bothered by health and safety. This jagerbomb, sunk at four in the morning.
We were there. We drank to you, for you, facetimed with you. We were there. Hugging mates, familiar faces, total strangers. We were there. When Meatball and Mings raised the Europa League trophy, when Amadou lifted his little lad quietly to a sea of beaming faces, when Unai, Nas and Wes showed us there really is no limit to our dreams. We. Were. There.
As Benjamin said, form is temporary, boys and girls, but class? That is permanent. And do you know what, we have class. In what we’ve built at home, and in the way we’ve travelled away. In the friendships formed in Mostar. In the mind of the Brugge chocolate shop owner who told me ‘Villa fans are different, not like the other countries, not even like the other English fans we’ve had here. You have respect, you have courtesy.’ In the beers, scarves and stories swapped with fans of Go Ahead Eagles, Bologna, SC Freiburg and all the rest.
These are memories forged forever. That pulse through us all, those who’ve shared the journey in person and from afar. That were built from endless website refreshing, plane planning and hotel room scouring. Challenged by getting to Bosnia ten days before Christmas, Deventer’s tiny slither of an away end or Italian air traffic control’s love of a strike.
But we made it. And we were there. For Youri’s strike. For Emi’s Beşiktan banger. For Morgan’s prod home.
And now we’re home. Broken. Broke. Buzzing.
Europa League Champions, 2026.
