Villa – West Ham; I fear for us here

Well, the holiday was great and the truth is I really wasn’t looking forward to coming back to this cold weather.
I hate this time of the year, with it being dark, damp and cold etc, but I always try to look for the positives and have always said that if you didn’t have the bad, you wouldn’t have the good would you?
Plus, at least it means we’re daily getting closer to the summer of next year.
I’m generally a pretty optimistic person.

Unfortunately, for some reason, it’s been decades since I felt so positive when it comes to football and particularly the Villa. I think it stems from donkey’s years of constantly being disappointed and it’s now a case of expect little and everything you get is a bonus.
Which probably sums up how I feel about this game. I really, strongly expect us to lose tomorrow.

Dean Smith has come out and said our games against Spurs and Wolves were pretty close really and I can see his point, although I felt we were very much second best to Spurs and throwing the Wolves game away was criminal.
He also quite rightly said that we were poor in the first half against Arsenal. That’s a massive understatement and it was probably one of the worst performances we’ve seen under the Great Barr man’s tenure.
Things did improve somewhat in the second half, but it was mostly because Smith changed the setup to something that the players were more comfortable with.
His total denial that the system led to the defeat is frankly laughable.
Smith also made the point that there is nothing wrong with the system; it worked well in previous games.
And he’s totally correct. It did.
But five at the back won’t work in every game and us fans could see it within minutes. Not half an hour or an hour, but minutes.
So why couldn’t Smith or the coaches? They must have done. I’ve always professed to be nothing like an expert in tactics, but even I could see it. So it tells me that Smith, as someone who does football for a living, flatly refused to change it so he could accomodate Tuanzebe. And it was only when he knew we would probably go on to lose by a worse score that he changed it at half time.
And this intransigence is what I can’t stand the most about Dean Smith. It may well be that he is looking at the bigger picture and we’re not seeing that. But we don’t care, do we? All we want as fans is win after win, week in, week out. It’s all that matters. No one remembers who came second, let alone ninth, tenth or eleventh or whatever.

So that’s my rant about Dean Smith. I’m trying to move on.

West Ham then and oh dear, what to say?
They beat us 3-1 at home last season and I expect at least the same tomorrow. They’re going well, having won 5, drawn 2 and lost 2. They’ll be strong and pushing for Europe again, because Moyes has them organised and well setup (playing a system they know, but hey ho).
Which makes me wonder how we’re going to set up against them.
Surely we can’t go five at the back again can we? Certainly not with Tuanzebe anyway. I don’t think he’s too bad a defender, but he has looked awful this season and has to be dropped. Along with many others I’d be strongly thinking about dropping Mings too and going with Hause alongside Konsa.
But I suspect it’ll be five at the back again to try and counter West Ham’s very good set pieces, which is something we’ve proven poor at defending up to now.
Then again, I think Mings is a liablity when it comes to set piece defending and it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if he is rested.

And of course, four or five at the back decides if we go with one or two up front.
Ings has played against West ham nine times and never scored. What does that mean?
Drop him because of that, or play him because he’s due a goal against them? Depends on your POV, I suppose. I don’t know either way.

Squad news then and we still have issues. Apart from the usual, Martinez is back after going to see his Father, who needed heart surgery in Argentina. Fair play son, some things are more important than football. I’m glad he’s back, as I feel he’s going to be seriously needed in this one.
Jaden Philogene-Bidace and conveniently, Morgan Sanson are both ill. Conveniently? Well, it seems a bit of a co-incidence after the player supposedly threw a strop at the Arsenal game.

I had a bit of a read up about Sanson and he went through a similar year to the last twelve months in 2016, I think it was. He got a serious injury, came back in November and then got another serious injury in January.

What actually led to me reading up on him was that it’s lurking in my head that I read somewhere that the Frenchman was said to have had a poor attitude. I’m normally very good at remembering that sort of thing, but couldn’t find any evidence to back it up, so I have to discard it as me being wrong (I definitely read it about someone though).

Whatever, what I did read was that it was said that the player found the physicality of Ligue 1 a real struggle and it took him a long time to come to terms with it. I find that concerning, as if he found the French league tough, what does that say about him getting to grips with the toughest league in the world?
I seriously suspect we now know why he hasn’t featured and I have to wonder if those who discovered him for the Villa knew about his history?

The only other news is that Smith commented that Leon Bailey was blowing during his run out in the Arsenal game.
I’d expect him to get on the pitch, but not start.

What to think then?
I think it’s more about trying to restore what seems like fragile confidence than anything. If we compete well and keep the result tight, I’ll possibly be happy enough with that.
A win is obviously the desirable outcome but I don’t see it. If we go something like two down by half time, things might get a bit tasty amongst the support, but hopefully it won’t come to that.

A 3-1 loss, I’m afraid.