Aston Villa 1 Wigan Athletic 0 – Cockney Latic Report

Warren Joyce is certainly not winning over many fans at the moment as he persists in playing games without a recognised striker on the pitch.

The first 15 minutes were a bit of an onslaught from Villa, but backing up the ‘we can get something out of this game’ feeling from the fans prior to kick off, they lacked a killer instinct and squandered their chances.

We did however grow into the game and did plenty of graft to keep Villa at bay, plus make our way to the final third on quite a few occasions.

But the stats at the end of the game would show a big fat zero in the shots on target column, sorry for spoiling the second half before we started on it.

After the break we carried on where we left off, but the lack of any real venom in front of goal will certainly fuel the fans that were screaming for the introduction of Grigg.

Alas it was not to come until we went behind, a stunning strike in the 88th minute undid all the hard work, but it was probably the only way Aston Villa were going to win.

I was sat there talking to Ruddy when I uttered the words “that Jack Grealish was a kid wonder here, he has wasted ten years of his career by sticking around instead of going on to a big club.”

” Look at him in this game, dictating most of what they do, he could have gone on to win silverware with a decent club!”, then bang.

Grealish gets the ball at his feet 20 yards out and sets his sight on goal. He spanks the ball towards the top corner and that was it, Jussi had no chance.

The ball flew past everybody and into the back of the net, what a strike. I would love to be critical of anyone, but I would be clutching at straws, it was just a great goal and further proved he is wasted at a very poor Villa.

The fact I say that Villa were very poor, sort of shows my hand in that I think we are much better than the current set of results is depicting.

I think the facts say that we couldn’t have done any worse in recent games, should we have played with strikers, rather than 5 or 6 midfielders.

We are still not out of sight, which proves that we can easily move away from the bottom 3 with a good run, but we need to start that good run.

I also know that Derby, Villa and Newcastle are not the easiest teams to go up against, but after seeing two of them, we had nothing to be scared of.

The Toon will be a totally different prospect I think and we have most certainly missed our best chances of getting points out of December (though Rotherham will be a very big game, one which we should and must win).

A message to the Gaffer, “don’t wait until we are losing to bring on a striker, 4 minutes isn’t enough time for any player”

I hope we catch Newcastle on a bad night, but I fear we won’t.