Supporting a football team is often a tense and unrewarding business. Even when your team is leading there is still the muscle-knotting fear of conceding a goal, of drawing, of losing. Just occasionally though, all tension is removed and replaced by loose, unburdened joy. For Aston Villa’s fans last week’s 5-1 win at Norwich was just such a moment – a moment to savour.
Seeing your team score five or more goals is one of the rarest sights in football, for it to happen in the top flight, away from home, after years of pain must make it special. Since receiving a 5-0 pummelling at Manchester City in November 2012, Villa have all too often been on the other side of one-sided games; a horrendous 8-0 mauling at Chelsea a few weeks later, the 6-1 beating at Southampton in 2014-15 in a season that also saw 3-0 and 5-0 losses to Arsenal in the league and later a dismal 4-0 FA Cup Final loss to the same opposition. 2015-16 was consistently cruel: 4-0 losses to Everton, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City (twice) and a 6-0 hiding by Liverpool at home. Relegation inevitably followed. A season to forget. One that hurt the fans, certainly until they were punched numb by loss after loss after loss.
In truth, Villa had been hanging on in the Premier League for several years; Villa Park had become an extremely difficult place to play, to win. Football fans are generally quite loyal but to follow a team is to make an investment in hope. Villa fans were not willing to throw good hope after bad and made the stadium an ugly, toxic theatre of rage, contempt and indifference. Attendances plummeted.
In retrospect it is difficult to blame the players, who were either too young (Traoré, Amavi, Veretout), too old (Guzan, Lescott) or not really players of Premier League quality (Gil, Sánchez, Gestede). Micah Richards, Villa’s captain that season, has recently admitted that the players were terrified to play in front of their own fans, pre-occupied with not being the one who made the first big error on the day, on their player ratings in the following day’s newspapers. To quote a man known in some circles as Bad Donald – ‘That’s sad!’
But failure is not in the falling down, it’s in the staying down. Unlike other recently fallen giants like Sunderland, Leeds and Nottingham Forest, Villa stabilised in the Championship and then challenged. Two very different promotion-worthy sides were built, first Steve Bruce’s team of wily veterans and second division talent, who didn’t quite have enough in their legs to win their play-off final, then Dean Smith’s slicker, quicker, younger team, who did.
Smith’s team was built around the quality and intelligence of John McGinn and Jack Grealish, the goals of loanee Tammy Abraham and the tough but modern steel of Tyrone Mings. The three still at the club have been pivotal to the positive performances (if not always results) this season. Abraham has been replaced by club record Wesley Moraes, an effective player despite the three centimetre disparity in the lengths of his left and right legs, and along with McGinn and Grealish he dismantled Norwich. All are showing signs that they are genuine top-flight players, neither yesterday’s men nor tomorrow’s.
Confident, attacking, destructive football requires three key pillars; quality, belief and a willing victim. Villa have the first, but to keep the second they will need to perform every week though they are unlikely to find many teams quite as pliable as Norwich City. With McGinn and now Grealish hitting form, Villa are more than capable of a few more soul-nourishing goalfests. Sport, life, is about trajectory. Villa, for so long on a downwards slope can now perhaps look up, forward, and cautiously replace indifference with guarded hope.
