Aston Villa captain Stiliyan Petrov believes Marc Albrighton is firing back

Aston Villa captain Stiliyan Petrov believes Marc Albrighton is close to recapturing the kind of form he showed after breaking into the team.

The young winger had largely struggled in his handful of starts for the claret and blues so far in this campaign and failed to hit the heights of last season.

But the 22-year-old stormed back to form with a man-of-the-match performance against Bolton last weekend and found the net for the first time since Villa's last visit to the Reebok Stadium in March.

Petrov said: "Marc had a tough time when he was out of the side. But he is willing to learn and willing to put things right through hard work.

"The expectation level was high for him when the season started and everyone was looking for him to be a replacement for Stewart Downing or Ashley Young when they left.

"He had a difficult start to the season, but he's coming in every day and working and trying to force his way into the manager's plans and he looked a different player.

"Now he is looking something like being back to his best. He has been running at people, taking people on, hassling them and scoring goals as well as creating them.

"I am happy things are turning around for him. Sometimes you have to put a fatherly arm around the young players at the club and I think the senior players are happy to do that."

Midfielder Fabian Delph has also recovered from a knee injury which kept him out of Villa's 2-1 win over Bolton and returned to training.

Villa assistant boss Peter Grant said: "He had a bit of a problem with his knee. It was more of a knock that he got in training but we can't take chances just now going into all these big games coming up.

"He was still feeling it a little bit and you could see that in his training. So we, more or less, made the decision for him, because you could see he wasn't moving freely.

"All the players are desperate to play, so great credit to him for coming onto the training pitch, but you could just tell he never had that sharpness about him and we just felt it was too important to take a chance on him.

"You know the Christmas period is so tough. You get very little time to rest so we couldn't afford to lose another body. We're glad to see him back on the training field and he feels a lot better now."