Match Preview: Aston Villa v Stoke City

by Dek Hogan 

Who are we playing?
Stoke City on Saturday 3rd October 2015

Where are we playing?
Villa Park, you know where it is.

Can I go?
Yep, tickets still on sale but don't leave it too long if you want to bag your favourite spot.

Easy to get to?
Doddle. We've got a shiny new station at New Street if you are getting the train in. With ticket barriers.

Can I watch it on telly?
UK telly can't showing live games (from anywhere) until 5.15pm on a Saturday. You'll have to find a dodgy dish pub or get a stream. If you can though, come to the game. The bigger the crowd, the more influence we can have. Don't spectate, participate.

Big game?
Huge.

We gave Liverpool acres of space

The stark fact is that in comparable games we are TEN POINTS WORSE OFF than we were last term.

A major factor in this truly awful start to the season has been Tim's team selections and tactics.

At Anfield, for more than an hour, we stood off Liverpool, giving them time and space to play with seemingly no attempt whatever to press the ball and put them under any pressure.

In the Premier League, against any team, that is tantamount to football suicide and it's fortunate that Liverpool are out of sorts at the moment because most other teams would have buried us the way Southampton did last season.

Does Tim need to think bigger?

Tim talked after the game of "staying in the division". That should be a fucking prerequisite, not an ambition and if Mister Sherwood thinks he can survive serving the sort of abject crap we saw at Anfield, he won't last very long.

He needs to take responsibility, start learning from his many mistakes and STOP THE ROT.

Tim Sherwood will be a good manager one day but he hasn't got there yet. We can argue the merits of whether Villa Park is the best place to learn his craft but we've got him now, we're stuck with him and we really have no option but to get behind him and help him to somehow make this work.

That certainly doesn't make him immune from criticism though and the last thing we want is for him to morph into Paul Fucking Lambert.

Tim can turn this around.

Shaqiri

Stoke City have been, by their recent standards, piss poor too, so this can be seen as a six point relegation battle. Stoke's form is a bit of a puzzle as Mark Hughes has seen the return of Bojan and added genuine quality in Shaqiri, but they come to us on the back of their first win of the season.

If Villa don't get three points AND put in a decent performance in this one, alarm bells will clang as loud as the full time boos.

Do Stoke City have any famous fans?

Not really. Heard of veteran squash player Angela Smith? Remember smart Alec quiz host Nick Hancock? No?

We've got fiddle playing scruffbox Nigel Kennedy off of Radio 3.

So we win.

Who's playing for us?
Increasingly hard to predict Tim's team selections these days. He surely can't persist starting both Sanchez AND Westwood in the same team.  Will he be bold enough to give the improving Jordans, Ayew and Vertout a start?

God knows what it would do to the Villa Park atmosphere were he daft enough to bring Gabby back. With speculation about Guzan's future, might Bunn be given a run out?

Who's playing for them?

Possibly not Shaqiri who seems to have tweaked a hamstring. Jon Walters, who nearly left the club in the window, appears to have found a bit of form.

Any useless stats?
Of course, here you go:

• Stoke City have beaten us 32 times while we have 51 wins. There have been 30 draws.

  

  Bigger than me and you

• This fixture last season was Tim Sherwood's first in charge. Ron Vlaar was sent off in the second minute of added time in the second half as he was shown his second yellow card in two minutes and is largely blamed for us losing the match 2-1 after we took an early lead through Scottie Sinclair.

• Our only Villa Park victory over The Potters in the last thirty years came in December 2009, when a John Carew goal gave us a 1-0 win.

• Didier Six scored a rare Villa goal in our previous Villa Park victory in 1985. A George Berry own goal from a Peter Withe shot gaves us a 1-0 nil lead on 75 minutes, then Six made sure of victory neting from close range from a Gary Williams free kick.

Didier Six scores v Stoke City

Prediction
Going for an all action 4-1 Villa win.