Villa 2-1 Wolves. Oct 30th.
As match atmospheres go, you don’t get much better than midweek cup games versus local rivals in front of a capacity crowd. Playing Wolves strains the description of ‘local derby’ to tell the truth, they’re just that bit removed from genuine rivals, rather like Coventry City, and we don’t hold them in particularly low regard, but we just about award the game derby status. Perhaps it’s more of a ‘derby-ette’.
We won the game 2-1 to progress to the quarter finals (where we’ll face Liverpool) but before getting overly triumphant, ought to acknowledge that we were effectively playing Wolves under 18s. Wolves play in European competition these days and have to use their squad sparingly given the fixture pile up, they therefore fielded some very fresh faced youngsters who were impish enough to give us the right run around until, ironically, an Elmohamady goal killed them off, he’s old enough to be father to most of them.
El Ghazi scored our first goal. He’s an enigma to me this guy, one of those lightning fast players with bags of skill but not always in the mood to parade it. It’s infuriating when you get a player like that, you’re grateful for the days when he does turn it on but wish he’d do so more often. He scored the only goal of the first half, a close range conversion of a cross, and terrorised them for most of the game. Ten minutes into the second, the Wolves youngsters had the impudence to equalise, so we immediately ran up the other end to score what turned out to be the winner, Elmo notching his first in over a year.
This fixture always reminds me of the time in 1981 when my Dad took us to the very same game, midweek v Wolves in the League Cup. It was 2-2 with a couple of minutes to go and he dragged us away to avoid the queues at the train station. We were about a hundred yards from the stadium when we heard the roar, Villa had scored a last minute winner. Thanks Dad 🤨
We won the game 2-1 to progress to the quarter finals (where we’ll face Liverpool) but before getting overly triumphant, ought to acknowledge that we were effectively playing Wolves under 18s. Wolves play in European competition these days and have to use their squad sparingly given the fixture pile up, they therefore fielded some very fresh faced youngsters who were impish enough to give us the right run around until, ironically, an Elmohamady goal killed them off, he’s old enough to be father to most of them.
El Ghazi scored our first goal. He’s an enigma to me this guy, one of those lightning fast players with bags of skill but not always in the mood to parade it. It’s infuriating when you get a player like that, you’re grateful for the days when he does turn it on but wish he’d do so more often. He scored the only goal of the first half, a close range conversion of a cross, and terrorised them for most of the game. Ten minutes into the second, the Wolves youngsters had the impudence to equalise, so we immediately ran up the other end to score what turned out to be the winner, Elmo notching his first in over a year.
This fixture always reminds me of the time in 1981 when my Dad took us to the very same game, midweek v Wolves in the League Cup. It was 2-2 with a couple of minutes to go and he dragged us away to avoid the queues at the train station. We were about a hundred yards from the stadium when we heard the roar, Villa had scored a last minute winner. Thanks Dad 🤨
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