When Newcastle scored at the death, like many of you, I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. If anything I was satisfied that the way the team played wasn’t validated with a result.
If one were to make the case that Villa played better in the first half, with the home side controlling the second, such an analysis would be accurate, but it would also be missing the point. The manager astutely went back to a 4-3-3, and our midfield three dominated Newcastle’s two man central midfield. After the first half, Newcastle were always going to come back into the game. When they did, our team responded by shutting up shop and playing for a draw.
In the most general sense playing for draws is the height of futility. We need to look no further than our West Midlands rivals to see that. The Tesco boys have 13 draws, while the next highest club is Southampton with nine. Alex McLeish almost took us down as he almost drew exactly half of his league games – in short, in a one point draw/three point win system, you are better off winning half and losing half than drawing them all.
That other than a couple counter-attacks we showed no attacking intent to try and score in a 0-0 game is embarrassing. Sadly it’s far from the first time we have seen such a defeatist attitude – we saw 90 minutes of it against Everton. That it was vaguely effective led to more selective analysis when the manager talked about how the team didn’t allow Everton any clear chances until the first goal, while forgetting how his players didn’t even think about fantasising about, maybe, hopefully, scoring a goal.
Paul Lambert was hired because he was a young, modern football mind who’s teams played a quality brand of football. Early in his reign he talked before every game about trying to win. A year and a half later he has a timid team that is terrified of losing, and when they win it almost feels like an accident. If the team is supposed to be playing the attack-minded football that he used to espouse, then it’s his failure to get a team made up of mostly his players to play the way he wants them to.
What’s more likely is that this is a team and a manager beaten down by heavy defeats and discouraged after poor performances. The ethos of the team is to hang on for dear life in their own end, and to hope for the best when it comes to trying to score. For a while, the club could point to improved results over last season, but even those have dried up.
More concerning to me is that the players who looked promising at the end of last season – the “young and hungry” who are part of the “long term plan” – have gone backward almost to a man. Watching the team play the way they do makes me worry about the future development of these young players. Ciaran Clark didn’t graduate from the academy hoofing the ball up the pitch. So, after doing it week after week, is it a bad habit or is this just what he is going to be?
The team isn’t going to 0-0 their way out of this rut. They need to find a way to get Christian Benteke on the ball, and by “on the ball”, I don’t mean the type of “service” he has been receiving. As big and imposing as he is, he is more than capable with the ball at his feet. If you look deep enough in the AVTV archives, you might even find evidence of such.
I still think there are enough clubs worse than us that we will be safe. As bad as it has looked at times I still thing we’ll be closer to mid-table than the drop. I am even still waiting to see the form of late last season and the early part of this season. My patience is certainly being tried in the meantime.
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