The games continue to come thick and fast. It is little surprise that the rollercoaster of emotions runs on a timescale measure in games rather than time, but when as now the time is much shorter the upswings and downswings are more violent when compared with other events in your life that continue at the same rate as usual. A little under a month ago, previewing the Southampton match, I was trying to rally spirits following defeats against Manchester City and Brighton (sic). Following an encouraging recovery, heads dropped again after a defeat to another small team, hailing not from not the Southern, but the Middle branch of the Saxon tribe. Now we are on a collective high, fearing the revelation of another false dawn following wins against Liverpool and Manchester City as I preview our game against Aston Villa.
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I have history with Aston Villa; most of it pretty ancient history. I saw them in the last match of the 1980-81 season, a 2-0 victory at Highbury thanks to goals from Brian McDermott and WIllie Young. I wish I remembered more about the game than the rather odd atmosphere at the end when both sets of fans celebrated ecstatically – the Arsenal fans, for obvious reasons and the Villa fans marking their seventh and to-date, last, league title.
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But May 1981 wasn\u2019t the first time I\u2019d seen them. That came at Christmas 1976, a match that I thought had taken place on Boxing Day, but the good people at 11v11.com<\/a> tell me took place on December 27th. We were spending the holidays with my brother who was working at ICI Billingham (Where the Sparrows Cough) at the time and decided to take in the game at Ayresome Park. Another strange atmosphere at this one. I have to rely on memory since the page<\/a> maintained by the aforementioned good people doesn\u2019t give the times of the goals, but as far as I remember there were three or four goals in the first fifteen minutes or so, which is three or four more than their fans tended to see in a month of \u2018Boro matches at that time, and several locals near us needed reassurance that it was actually happening as their team ran out 3-2 winners. (Not 4-2 as I had remembered, so maybe I\u2019m making the whole thing up.) I have a vague feeling that I may have seen them playing Derby County or Leicester City some time between the above two matches but I can\u2019t remember any details at all with which I can put off starting this preview. I\u2019ve had a quick trawl around some Villa fan sites in search of ideas about their likely line-up, but had no luck as they are filled with people wailing and gnashing their teeth about the team\u2019s likely relegation, that would become certain if they fail to win this match. This is a genuine problem for which it is worth rending your clothes and, having no particular beef with Aston Villa or their supporters, I sympathise. Failing in my search for useful gossip, I took a look at the players listed as unavailable on the Fantasy League<\/a> site but other than goalkeeper Tom Heaton, I\u2019d never heard of any of their injured players. It seems, then, that our opponents have much more to play for than do the Arsenal. I choose to regard this as a Good Thing as it will allow us to judge the depth of the transformation Mikel has wrought upon the team. I think there will be little argument when I suggest that our previous rookie Basque manager would have struggled to get the team \u201cup\u201d for a match against Aston Villa after our recent run of games. Putting in a good, committed, performance approaching those we put in against \u201cthe two best teams in Europe\u201d in our last two games will provide reassurance that the team has taken in what is required to compete for the Premier League title. It\u2019s been a good few years since we\u2019ve seen a team with that knowledge running out at Ashburton Grove for every game. Even before news of his hamstring injury broke, I thought it was time to give Mustafi some time off, and surely Aubamayang deserves a rest. Here\u2019s my pretty uninformed prediction for the team: Martinez<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soares Holding Luiz Tierney<\/p>\n\n\n\n Saka Xhaka Torreira Willock<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lacazette Nkeiteh The Holics\u2019 Pound<\/strong> I\u2019m still an uninformed betting man – giving the heart full rein over the head, I would back an unfamiliar 4-0 to the Arsenal. I see signs that the defence is coming out of its prolonged funk and will have enough about it to keep out the Aston Villa front men and I think the attacking line-up is going to click. In general, I prefer not to risk disappointment by being too gung-ho. Don\u2019t let me down Arsenal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The games continue to come thick and fast. It is little surprise that the rollercoaster of emotions runs on a timescale measure in games rather than time, but when as now the time is much shorter the upswings and downswings are more violent when compared with other events in your life that continue at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1118,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions\/1118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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