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I guess we must be turning the corner. Wigan showed Villa so much respect in B6 this afternoon that you can only wonder at Paul Jewell's pre-match team talk: "Get amongst them, lads. Eleven men behind the ball and let them know they're in a fight. Go down if you get the chance. Kick a few plums. And for crying out loud, don't give this lot any room to play. If you do, they'll murder us". Or something like that.
It is always difficult to play football against a side that doesn't want to. Whether the pocketful of Latics supporters who had made the trip from Lancashire felt they got value for their time and money, I can't say.
But put it like this: I can remember only four Wigan shots in the 97 minutes, and none at all in the second half. After fifteen minutes, on the other hand, Villa had forced six corners. It tells a story, doesn't it? You might be tempted to get charitable and say that such negativity was forced on Wigan by the sending-off of Valencia after 40 minutes. But the truth is Wigan's stall was set out far earlier than that.
Quite frankly Wigan were awful. Dire. At times disgraceful in attitude and often woeful in execution.
Before the sceptics start moaning and dipping their digital quills in cyber-ink, I'm with you all the way. Villa must be more ruthless, more streetwise. An inept team reduced to ten men has got to be put to the sword. And it wasn't. And yes, I agree with you entirely...Villa have to move the ball more quickly and more positively. They need some penetration in the last third. And it might help if they spent the odd minute or two at Bodymoor Heath next week on defending set pieces.
However, notwithstanding all that, the plain fact is that this was a stirring Villa performance. With the impish Maloney and the classy Berger both in fine fettle and Wigan struggling - even in the opening minutes - to cope with Agbonlahor's pace and sharpness, it looked for all the world like Villa were finally going to bag a hatful.
Gardner, playing wide on the right early on with Petrov behind the midfield, was industrious and mobile. Barry, tucked inside Berger, seemed to be relishing a role in the centre of the park and only the linesman's flag stopped him putting both Gabby and Maloney through in the first quarter.
A few calamitous passes each from Laursen, Mellberg and Sorensen suggested that if Wigan were going to tease anything out of this game, it was going to be as a result of Villa's own error-proneness at the back. And so it proved. Twenty-five or so gone, Sorensen stays rooted to his line for a collector's item of a Wigan corner, and no-one else bothered to defend it.
I have rarely if ever seen a goal so completely against the run of play. But at the same time I am beginning to grow concerned at Sorensen's inability to command his six-yard box, let alone his penalty area.
The goal rather took the wind out of Villa's sails, who for the remainder of the second half looked dazed. Valencia's red card for a studs-up challenge on Freddie Bouma, with which Paul Jewell afterwards had no issue, sent Barry to left back and brought Ashley Young onto the right flank. It also effectively put an end to Wigan's only attacking ploy, belting the ball to Emile Heskey. The pattern of the game was to stay the same from then on: the school first eleven against the overfed playground bullies.
Villa were even more positive in the second half. In the first period, Petrov had been a water-carrier with no water to carry. In the second, he got forward and played some delightful floated balls into the Wigan box. Bardsley and Barry used both flanks well. Villa showed great intelligence - stretching an outnumbered and outpaced Wigan side by using the full width of the pitch. There came wave after wave of attacks. Yes - a little too patient. Yes - a little too tentative. But it was purposeful, creative, attacking football and we have yearned for it for so long that I am in no mood to knock it.
There was some potty refereeing and assistant refereeing from Halsey and his team in the second half. And Villa's equaliser started it. Of course we were ecstatic when the linesman confirmed that Gabby's scrambled finish had crossed the line. And it had. But from where I sit, right on the eighteen yard line, Berger looked the best part of five yards offside before delivering the cross. Sshhh - mum's the word.
The balance of luck and misfortune was duly adjusted in the last quarter. Goalkeeper Filan, who stretched both patience and the laws of the game to the limit, can count himself mighty lucky not to have received a second yellow for kicking the ball away after his first for persistent time wasting (which started, incidentally, in the fortieth minute. Yes, that's the fortieth). Wigan should have lost another defender for hauling down a racing Agbonlahor late on - Gabby was clearly in on goal and the challenge was clearly cynical. And if Villa's equaliser should never have been given, there was a second which, to me, looked every bit as over-the-line as the first and nowhere near as offside. All wrong I'm afraid, Mr. Halsey, all wrong.
At the end of the day, a point's not enough from a game in which Villa genuinely murdered the opposition. Wigan will claim that they battled for a gritty and hard-fought draw. Don't buy it: they got taken apart and escaped with a point from a mind-numbingly nasty and negative performance.
Well, we murdered Bolton in December and got zip. Four months on, we murdered another load of Lancastrians and got a point. Four months from now we'll be getting ready for the 2007-2008 Premiership season - you work it out.
And if anyone, particularly in The Times, starts making comparisons between Villa's points haul this season and that under O'Dreary last term, just try to remember the desperate, clueless, disheartening football that Villa were playing last Spring. This looked nothing at all like that. Unless you were wearing a Wigan shirt.
The corner's been turned. The rest will come.
Villa: Sorensen 5; Bardsley 6; Mellberg 6; Laursen 6; Bouma 7 (Sub 40': Young 7); Gardner 7; Petrov 7; Barry 7; BERGER 9; Maloney 8 (sub 70': Moore 7); Agbonlahor 8.
Man-of-the-Match: BERGER. Pulled all the strings again.
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