VILLA 0-0 Fulham

By: Chris | November 30th, 2008

In the summer of 1992, I was given an official handbook to the inaugural Premier League season. The kind-hearted Brighton fan who made this donation can’t have foreseen the damage the new League would do to the tradition of English football – nor that his club would still not be in a new home by 2008.

In that grey guide, two things stood out to my seven-year-old self. First, the staggering number of camera angles BSkyB would provide, outnumbered, as it turned out, by the number of instances of hyperbole and superlative in the first 30 seconds of any Richard Keys broadcast.

For some reason, the second was that the book noted the inconsistency of Aston Villa.

“wonderful one week, woeful the next”

Those days are back, ladies and gentlemen, only this time we won’t nearly win the title.

Yesterday, Aston Villa hosted Fulham with high hopes of consolidating in fourth. On the back of four points from matches against Arsenal and Manchester United, confidence around Villa Park was in the stratosphere.

Sadly, it seems that might be the problem.

The goalless scoreline at full time was disappointing, but the real shame was that this was yet another game we would have won if we could only have cut out the basic errors.

Villa were by far the better team but, looking back on how often we gave the ball away, perhaps we got what we deserved.

We also squandered several gilt-edged chances. Gareth Barry was the main culprit, but it was fantastic to see him getting into dangerous positions and he did, at least, test time-wasting goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer.

All told, we weren’t great but we should have won. Luke Young and Brad Friedel were excellent, Ashley Young and Steve Sidwell workmanlike but disappointing.

James Milner just couldn’t get his crossing going (again), while Gabriel Agbonlahor pulled Aaron Hughes and Brede Hangeland all over the place in the kind of performance that would be world-class if it didn’t leave Villa constantly lacking a threat in the penalty area.

Stiliyan Petrov was, as we’ve come to expect, clever, hard-working and composed.

With Bobby Zamora lumbering and Andrew Johnson as crap as always, Fulham threatened little. What they do have, though, are a superb manager who has them picking up away points like never before, and the sheer brilliance of Jimmy Bullard. He pulled the strings all afternoon.

Still, we’re fourth and Arsenal need to beat Chelsea to go past us. But I expect inconsistency to become the defining feature of our season – wins over the big boys and defeat against the bottom half on bitterly cold afternoons at Villa Park.

It’s going to be a rollercoaster, but with any luck there won’t be a bigger drop than the one which saw Fulham leave B6 with the same number of points in their swag-bag as Manchester United a week previously.