Firstly, let me offer my apologies for my absence. As some of you will know, I started my new job last Monday and, as is often the case when you start somewhere new, there’s a lot to take in. As a result, I’ve found myself having early nights and trying to focus on things.

In addition, after walking away from the game on Sunday, there was this frustrating sense of apathy. I knew that as soon as I got home I’d have to write my column for the Express & Star’s Monday paper because the printing presses run on Sunday night.

After watching that game, what could I say? In typical Villa style, we go and beat one of the contenders for the title, and then decide to lay down and be well beaten by Stoke City 4-1.

I remember as we were still 3-1 the idea that we might still get back into the game, but there’d be that feeling that the scoreline didn’t really reflect what we were watching. 3-2 would suggest that things were close, that we were unlucky, and that the result could be somewhat ignored.

However, if I’m honest, I don’t think you can ignore a 4-1 defeat, nor the situations that arose during the game. For example, when Karim El-Ahmadi went off, time passed trying to decide who was coming on. First Marc Albrighton took his tracksuit off to get ready, so that seemed like it was it. Easy. One off, one on.

I’d said to my Dad that Andi Weimann looked like he’d be coming off too. For Stoke’s second goal, you could see our number 10 was well off the pace, and it was that early in the game that my only assumption was that he wasn’t actually fit, as though he had been shoehorned into the team to fit.

As it turned out, Weimann did go off, with Albrighton being his replacement, with our Tamworth winger playing this unfamiliar role as a number 10. The man coming on to replace El-Ahmadi? Yacouba Sylla.

That substitution seemed pretty straight forward – a midfielder for a midfielder – so why in the name of anything logical did it take so long to happen? For what seemed like ages – but was probably about six minutes – we played with 10 men.

In itself, that’s OK – plenty of teams do the same when someone is injured – but in this case, against a Stoke team that appeared to be playing us off the park, the time taken to get things sorted didn’t really seem acceptable.

In addition, if we looked at the bench, you could see just how weak we really are. Beyond the first team, and in some cases even in the first team, we’re lacking quality. I’d argue that the team starting are good enough to be in the Premier League, but when glancing across the bench, I did wonder how many real game changers there were. In the end, I figured there weren’t any, and I also said – as we made our double substitution – that we’d see Grant Holt around the 70th minute.

As it turned out, he came on in the 72nd minute – a predictable move that wasn’t likely to change much. In a sense, Paul Lambert is limited because he hasn’t got the option to buy anyone when the window is shut, and we’ve previously seen that he hasn’t always got the money when the window is open either.

So what does that say for us? I think it says we’ll be safe, but yet again that will be a lot to do with garbage teams that are below us. We’re not awful, but we do smack of being middle-of-the-road, though one could argue over half of the league are in the same position.

What matters for us now is we get two more wins to ensure we stay up. Fulham should provide one of those wins but, as with all things Aston Villa, you never can tell.

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