I’m not really sure how to follow up after yesterday’s performance, or even what to write really. Aston Villa went to the Emirates, played a game of football, and then came away with nothing.

After the season we’ve been having, I’m at the point where such a result is neither suprising or even shocking. Villa’s football has been poor this season, and Arsenal’s recent form has been blistering. The combination was invariably going to end up with three points to Arsenal, and us going back up the motorway with our tail between our legs.

Yes, I actually suggested before the game that 9/1 was a good return for a Villa win and, in pure betting terms, it wasn’t exactly the biggest waste of a fiver a man can make outside of local drinking establishment.

Still, Villa’s performance at the Emirates was, if we are being honest, pretty poor. Our 90 minutes of playing yielded a full three shots, two of which were blocked, and a third of which missed the target. So, even if Villa scored with every chance they had, and ignoring for a second the fact that one of those three didn’t even go in the right direction, it would only have been a draw.

On the back of said performance, a draw would have been little short of daylight robbery. The reality is that Villa didn’t deserve a point for their performance, and were lucky to escape with only three goals conceded.

Of course, we can sit and dissect the team and the selections, invariably offering ideas that Andreas Weimann would have been better suited up front in place of Emile Heskey, or that other such changes may have made the game better.

Would it though? I mean, look at Arsenal’s form, and Villa’s increasingly dispondent team full of many aging players, as well as several not-good-enough youth. Villa’s possession was sub-30%, they didn’t even managed half of the passes Arsenal did and, of those Villa did make, a mere 67% of them completed.

In fact, just as Villa has dominated every statistic against Fulham at home, so Arsenal have done the same against us on Saturday. Was it expected? Not as a definite, but it was a distinct possiblity. Is it largely believable? Yes.

In this season, I’m actually at the point where little will surprise me when it comes to Villa. The team, seemingly capable of performances when they put their mind to it, is constantly shifting between interested and uninterested, between real football and anaemic impersonations of the beautiful game. Part of that has to sit with the manager, but part of it sits with the team. Such inconsistency is largely a player problem, frustrating as the improvement of Stephen Ireland has been offset by the seeming decrease in talent, and effort, in many other players.

For some, it is just a case of a being a year older and thus a year closer to retirement. For others, mainly the youth, it is a case of merely not being good enough in the first place. The main thing though is that Villa have players who are either past it, who are never likely to be good enough, or who suffer transient application issues such as those that have afflicted both Ireland and Charles N’Zogbia.

I’m not going to sit and analyse the game beyond what I have already. Anyone who has watched it knows it wasn’t good enough, and that three goals were scored by Kieran Gibbs, Theo Walcott, and Mikel Arteta. One was a free kick, the others weren’t. Shay Given, a bastion of talent in an otherwise erratic team was, for once, seemingly a shadow of himself.

So it was a poor game, and we lost, but it was a mere three points and we didn’t get hammered in a goal sense. Some may consider this apologetic, but it isn’t. We can’t expect to play this badly each week and be happy with it, but in this season, the result is neither surprising nor shocking – I’m not angry, merely disappointed.

The sooner we finish this season, and the sooner we know we are safe, the better. There’s nothing much else to say about the whole season to date besides that it has been forgettable, and it will hopefully remain that way unless we capitulate and get relegated. I still don’t see that happpening though. Maybe I’m mad, but I think Villa have enough to stay safe, despite Saturday’s performance and some good results for Bolton and Wigan.

The only question remaining for the relegation battle that will hopefully continue to rage below us is who are the two teams going down with Wolverhampton Wanderers because, even in my optimism, I think Terry Connor’s team are almost dead and buried, in confidence terms at least.

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