Great result on Sunday. It wasn’t our best performance but considering we hadn’t won away so far this season it was never going to be easy to come away with three points, writes Villa blogger Gregg Williams.
Gabby’s winner was a great moment, with the award for best celebration going to my friend Dom who kissed the TV while the rest of us jumped for joy!
I have some sympathy with the Blues, they could easily have had a penalty in the first half, but the way they played there’s no guarantee they’d have scored it.
Even if we had gone a goal behind I’d still have backed us to get a result.
Unfortunately for them we’ve really progressed since their last spell in the Premiership, and with every year that goes by the gap in quality is only going to get bigger.
We may not have been at our best, but our class players still managed to shine through.
Young was clearly too good for them, giving a superb wingers performance, but for me the real difference was Barry and Petrov.
They won the midfield battle with commitment, composure and ability that Blues couldn’t compete with.
Carson showed that it is possible for a Villa keeper to perform in a derby without dropping any clangers, and our back four all looked solid.
We were a little unbalanced with Mellberg and Reo-Coker both playing out of position on the right hand side, but come January this should be sorted.
We may also see Salifou get a chance before too long after his impressive performances in the reserves.
I’d say Martin O’Neill got it spot on as usual after the game, it was a relief to pick up three points but we must improve, and the next two games, both away from home, will give us a real indication of how far we’ve come and what we still need to do to push on for Europe.
For now though, we can enjoy our third consecutive derby win.
Villa fans, what do you think? Have your say below
6 Comments
So nice to gloat for a while, Isn’t it.
I don’t think we are quite good enough to challenge for Europe yet but the important thing is to hang on in the top ten until January which will be difficult with a lot of away games and matches against Arsenal and Chelsea before then. If we are still in a decent position by the January transfer window then I hope MON will be able to attract the 2/3 quality players that will lift us into the top 7.
The news that Riise will not now be joining us in January is a bit of a blow. But in my opinion the constant and often irrational criticism by some Villa fans of every player that MON has brought in probably doesn’t help when players are considering whether or not to join us.
We’ve got a long long way to go before Europe.
We’re making big headway locally and Bruce is getting so worried he’s beginning to blame the refs on a regular basis. That’s when you know there are problems at Blues and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him gone before the end of the season if he’s starting to lose perspective on what’s going wrong at St Andrews.
This derby is finished if the blosers can’t sell out for their cup final?
we’d sellout for any game of any allocation locally so this just proves the Birmingham derby is a fad and the real traditional,historical derby is with the other lot in handsworth.
Bring on the BirmingYam derby next season and leave the blosers and villans from erdington and east brum etc to it.
or lets just concentrate on teams in the european places and stop being so small time.
It was a great result for us, not the beautiful game as we would like to see, or as convincing as we would have wanted, but its those kind of results we need to get from here on in. As always the villa blues game is always a punt against the form book, but i think we never had a worry of picking something up from the game, thankfully it was three points. The blues have conceded a fair few goals, and we’ve scored quite a few, so the form was with us, but we had drawn too many away games to that point, more on that in a moment.
A few of blues players had performed quite well recently, granted not against the best opposition, for example a slim home win over bolton, a hard fought win over wigan, both struggling teams, but thats all. They hadn’t done anything special, anything outstanding, ok they scored 2 against chelsea, but so did we and without conceding 3.
I think things are looking good for the villa, my ony concern is that come the end of the season we may end up lamenting are draws, as said earlier. Looking at our away performances, if we had just held out and not lost our way against spurs, and grabbed something in the bore-draw at newcastle, thats another 4 points and puts us up to 5th in the league, and no one would be questioning the progress we have made this season as has been written on various blogs both here and elsewhere.
The truth is, we didn’t get those results, and we move onwards and upwards. 21 points after 12 games isn’t bad, 8th in the league. Chris is right, our position come january will dictate the business we do in the transfer window. The mid-season transfer window i think is wrong, can we expect to buy a quality player to push us that extra yard into europe, or shall we concentrate on working onthe heart of the team we have(which is british i may add) and establish a hard working, enthusiastic team.
There are some players that have not cut the mustard, and i believe never will. Does that make them squad players? Not sure. At the end of the day Harewood has not performed, apart from the dismal display at Spurs, I can’t think of anytihng he has done that has stuck in my mind, he scored one goal in the cup, in two appearances, and has come on as a sub in the league three times, and done nothing. Looking at his history, he didn’t get into double figures last season, so why did we buy him, on the hope that he would score 14(05/06) or 18(04/05) goals a season? If he gets 10 goals as a squad player then great, but I am not holding my breath.
So when it comes to the players we are looking for in January, for example Riise, do we want him? We need to build a youthful squad for the future, he is only 27 and has a good few years ahead of him, but we have the experience in the defence, you need to balance the experience with the youthful pacey agile players, especially with fast skilful wingers coming at you.
Anyway, all in all its a result we wanted, and a result i predicted with many friends and a bookies!! LoL!! Lets gloat for a while, and move on, the ‘Borough next, away. Lets take it by the scruff of the neck, and destroy them. get another 3 points on the board.
Keeping the faith
Ben
villa are a long way off being the finished article, we need several top class players to move us amongst the elite, the players brought so far are mostly squad players. Mon needs time to put us in a position to attract these certain players so keep the faith and ignore the knockers because we haven’t won the premiership within 18 months, ol’fergie took 7 seasons and were not that far ahead of us in terms of club at the time and that was after atkinson threw it away anyhow.