Aston Villa title challenge over as they go back to the future without success

It’s been a frustrating start to the year in many ways for Aston Villa, whose title charge has faltered as they’ve been reminded of precisely where they stand in the food chain.

Really, if you want to be twee and insufferably glib about it, the end of their title challenge is a ‘don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened’ situation given how impossibly unlikely it is for anyone outside the gilded elite to do what Villa have done over the last few years under Unai Emery.

But there will be immense frustration at the way it’s actually ended during such a difficult winter transfer window. Villa’s challenge has been built on their home form, so for it to unravel on the back of defeats at Villa Park to Everton and Brentford is far more irritating in many ways than coming unstuck against the big bullies.

Villa’s preferred narrative is, understandably, to lash out at the unfairness of the world. Harder to make that stick when you’ve just lost for the third time this season to a Brentford side that lost 40 goals, their captain and their manager in the summer.

Doesn’t mean it’s not valid, though, and this game was a product of Villa’s make-do-and-mend January that was born of necessity.

There was a back to the future feel in the returns of Douglas Luiz and Tammy Abraham to Aston Villa colours. Leon Bailey came off the bench for his second appearance since returning from his loan at Roma, while yet another rare Harvey Elliott appearance tips him and Villa closer to the 10-game precipice where the one thing nobody wants to happen happens and he ends up here permanently.

Villa have tried to build a squad to keep them competitive with Arsenal and City, but they just can’t do it.

This day was always going to come at some point over the next few months, but that doesn’t make it coming right now any less irritating for Villa. This was a stupid game of football that they really shouldn’t have lost.

They hadn’t done enough to take control of the game in a first 40 minutes where the only real talking point was a mischievous one about whether Ollie Watkins would have done better than Abraham did with an early one-on-one chance that was, in truth, superbly dealt with by Caoimhin Kelleher.

Then Kevin Schade decided to thrust his studs hard into Matty Cash’s testicles. It was certainly a choice. There were two consequences; one inevitable, one entirely unexpected. The first was that he got a red card. We very much enjoyed the half-time Sky chat that suggested Cash may have over-reacted to having a size nine thrust hard into his spuds given that it is generally accepted to be both painful and hilarious to suffer any kind of impact to that particular area.

The unexpected bit was that it was Brentford rather than Villa who benefited, Dango Ouattara profiting from a bit of luck as his own cross ricocheted back to him before he curled an extremely aesthetically pleasing shot from a tight angle beyond Emi Martinez into the one tiny corner of the goal available to him.

The second half was, as you’d expect, largely an exercise of attack v defence. But one in which the defenders of Brentford almost always looked more convincing than the attackers of Villa.

The one exception appeared to have ended in the perfect storyline of a goal on his second debut for Abraham, only for VAR to go right back to the start of the move where Leon Bailey was initially adjudged to have kept the ball in by his own corner flag.

VAR decided it had definitely gone out. To which the only real response is ‘Hmm’. From the replays we saw, it very much looked like One Of Those to us. It probably did go out of play, but we all know from experience that from any angle other than straight along or above a line that a ball can very convincingly look like it’s crossed it entirely without actually having done so.

Our fence-sitting position until and unless we see a hitherto unbroadcast angle of it is that it’s probably the right decision but one that leaves us feeling a touch uncomfortable. It does rather look like VAR has taken a guess. An educated guess. Probably a correct guess. But still a guess. It’s not a road we’re particularly comfortable with the game taking, but we’re well aware we’re yelling at clouds by this point.

What was undeniable was that Villa simply didn’t do enough on an afternoon where the precise location of balls proved pivotal more than once.

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