Chelsea 2 -1 Villa: Tactically poor and we got away lightly.

Blimey, I called it correctly again.
That’s two on the trot and probably a record for me.

Mason Mount got the MOTM, but Abraham couldn’t have been far off it. Willian too.
And I think that somewhat summed things up, in that Chelsea made us look very average.

I personally don’t think we set up correctly for this game, with Hourihane starting and it was there to see very early on.
I like Hourihane as an an attacking option, but this was a midfield game where we needed battlers to counter Chelsea’s ovbvious class. This is absolutely not Hourihanes’s type of game and to prove it, we got better later on when we beefed up the midfield and took him off.

Make no mistakes, this could easily have been 4,5 or more goals against and it annoyed me because it was so obvious.

I’ve seen McGinn criticised, but I don’t think he did much wrong. When you’re on the back foot, it’s hard for your game to shine.
Grealish did ok and drew fouls, but Chelsea made the most of the fact that the first yellow took a long time coming.

The defence, whenever it faces any prolonged pressure, looks really poor.
I don’t really want to point fingers here, but everyone looks really panicky and it’s not good enough.

Sadly, I think I’ve had it with Wesley.
Ok, he had very little to work with tonight and that’s been pretty much a consistent state, but he did have two very scorable chances, where he skied both.
It depends what you think about him, I guess and they might not have been particularly good chances, but I made the point that Trezuguet seemed to be in better striking positions at times tonight.
That’s not a first either.
I just don’t think Wesley is an instinctive striker at this level and we simply have to improve on him in the window.

A 2-1 loss isn’t so bad against Chelsea, but we got off light and as much as we came back later, it wasn’t the performance I expected, to say the least.