Stoke 3-2 Villa. Not impressed.

By: Martini Extra Dry | August 23rd, 2008

After a successful 07-08 season, then the addition of our new reinforcements and last week’s four goals against City, I don’t think there were many Villa fans who weren’t expecting us to romp home in this game. Arrogant? Maybe, but not completely borne out of disrespect for Stoke, more through confidence and enjoying the good times we’re having at Villa. Well now who looks stupid?!

Three times we went behind in the game and twice we pulled it level, but when Sidibe hooked it in over the back of his head in injury time, the 5 seconds left on the clock weren’t enough for Villa to do it a third time.

The possession of the game was pretty much evenly split but Stoke definitely looked the more convincing team. The new boys took their first ever Premiership points in a game they worked very hard to win. Often the newly promoted teams cause upsets in the early games as they are still on a high from their promotion, so fair play to Stoke.

Laursen brought down Delap on the half hour mark and Liam Lawrence tucked away the penalty to give Stoke the lead to go into half time with. Carew nicely brought Villa back into the game 20 minutes into the second half but Ricardo Fuller got the home fans chanting again with 10 minutes left. Laursen, after arguably being at fault for both the Stoke goals, again gave Villa an undeserved equaliser just a few minutes later but the point wasn’t to be and Stoke won it in injury time.

This was not Villa at their best and it is to be hoped that we will learn a lot from this poor display and not repeat it too often through the season. Our defence needs to tighten up severely and quickly. Scoring goals again seems like it will come easy for us, like last season, if we could score two in a poor game such as this.

Thanks to the predictors who commented on the previous post, I wish you’d been right, especially Matt the Hull fan’s 0-56! But even Richard’s 1-1 would’ve been better than the actual result.

Congratulations to Stoke, you deserved your win and you should enjoy this to the full… but for us Villans it’s not been a good day… Let’s all get drunk!