Mike Taylor, BBC Radio WM
Villa Park’s surface is always perfectly manicured, so Leon Bailey had to make do with burying his face in the turf at the end of the game, having spent the previous 30 seconds looking for a hole he could disappear into. Only hearts of stone felt no sympathy for him. Running energetically throughout, he had the first and last chances of the game, and missed them both.
“Surely will be very difficult to sleep tonight,” he wrote in an apologetic social media post. But he should spare himself too much of the hair-shirt treatment. There were other reasons Villa didn’t beat Wolves, largely rooted in collectively kicking-off an hour late.
Players only reach the Premier League at all if they are high-level performers, or at least thought to have that potential. With a few exalted exceptions, the best teams and players are marked by the frequency with which they reach that standard; the more often they manage it, the higher up the league they finish.
After being shown plenty of evidence in his first few games as Villa coach of why they can push up the table, Unai Emery was now given a demonstration of why they haven’t yet.
Perhaps he was musing on that during the first half, when the TV camera settled on him, motionless and agape in the dugout. He was still there when the camera panned back during a pause in play ten minutes later, and the players taking a drink made sure not to catch his eye, lest his glare turn them to ash on the spot. Normally of a cheerful nature in public, it turns out that Emery has a headmaster-level angry stare. There were 36,000-odd others in the stadium to match.
Villa’s pallid first half did, however, allow the coach to do his stuff. The five-substitute allowance is proving a significant change, offering creative managers more levers to pull to influence a game. Emery and Julen Lopetegui indulged in substitution-tennis, covering each other’s tactical moves, and it added to the spectacle. Villa were revived.
Of the substitutes, Ludwig Augustinsson particularly impressed, and Danny Ings scored Villa’s goal. Ings has started only one of Emery’s five League games, prompting whispers of a move away, but when questioned, Emery brought back his poker-face.
“We didn’t speak about it… I don’t know… he’s staying with us,” he said.
Ings has scored five goals in his last seven League games, so it seems unlikely that Villa would be so imprudent as to let him leave without lining up a high-calibre replacement first. But January is a long month.
*Villa v Stevenage in the FA Cup third round is live on BBC Radio WM (95.6FM/DAB/Freeview 722 and online at BBC Sounds) on Sunday, kick-off 16:30 GMT
