English Premier League: Part 1 Losers of the second weekend
The biggest losers of the weekend, in every sense of the word lost are Aston Villa. Villa parted ways with their outstanding manager Martin O’Neill over the summer due to some differences over the financial situation at the club. These differences arose between club owner Randy Lerner and Martin largely due to the sale of James Milner coupled with a shortage of transfer funds for the 2010 summer transfer window.
O’Neill’s departure caused Kevin MacDonald’s appointment as the temporary caretaker manager of the club but he has been inconsistent so far. Kevin rallied the troops brilliantly for Villa’s first match of the season against West Ham United at Villa Park. In the following midweek, Europa League match against Rapid Wien, Villa earned a draw against the Austrian club side despite playing with an apparently young side which was devoid of most of the starters at Aston Villa.
This prompted fans to think that Villa will most likely start with their strongest line up for their weekend’s league encounter against Newcastle United and this turned out to be true but what followed was evidently not what the fans wanted. Aston Villa dominated the first 20 to 25 minutes of the match and then self destructed after John Carew blasted a penalty kick over the bar and into the stands. Newcastle gained strength from there on in and battered the Villa defence time and again. At the end of the match, Aston Villa stood in shame and disgrace as the final score was six nil to Newcastle United.
Who is to be blamed for such a shambolic display that Aston Villa provided at Saint James’s Park? A logical person will signal towards Randy Lerner, who has let Villa go on without a proper manager for the first two weeks of the season. The American business man has yet to make a decision on who is to take a full time managerial job at Aston Villa. There is no shortage of candidates with the likes of Eriksson and Bradley expressing their interest in the vacancy but Lerner has been strangely silent when it comes to this matter.
Such a trend in this decision making can cause Villa to suffer even further, as it is quite evident that the club has one of the smallest squads in the league. Despite the fact that their starting eleven is quite competitive, any injury to the likes of Carew, Downing, Petrov or Young can signal the end of Villa’s chances of finishing in the top half of the league table come May, 2011. The fashion in which Aston Villa capitulated in their second English Premier League game of the season may be a sign of things to come for the club. Regardless of the vast difference in quality between Newcastle United and Aston Villa, the Birmingham club’s defence was child like at times as Andy Carroll and Co, successfully dispatched six goals past the despairing Brad Friedel.
The second league weekend was also a disappointing for most of the penalty takers. There were thirty five goals in the second round of matches but just one penalty was on spot. Morten Gamst Pedersen for Blackburn, John Carew for Aston Villa, Nani for Manchester United and Carlton Cole for West Ham United all failed to convert their penalty kicks into goals in their respective matches.
One thing to note is that, Andrei Arshavin had no problem in scoring from the spot as far as his penalty kick was concerned but the psychological impact of the misses cannot be understated. Aston Villa, Manchester United, West ham United and Blackburn all failed to win their matches on the weekend after their penalty takers had failed them from 12 yards out.
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