Burnley – Villa; I’m worried

Worried about who Dean Smith is going to start for this one, that is.
If I see Lansbury or Hourihane start, I think I’ll have totally given up with the manager.

I’m also worried about how this game is going to go too, as I fear it’s going to be a case of men against boys, with Burnley bullying us all over the pitch.
The problem is then who comes in?

Well, if we need to move from powder-puff, flair players in the middle, we probably need to go with Nakamba and Luiz. The trouble is, they’ve been tried together and it really didn’t work.
Am I the only one who wishes Whelan and Hutton were still here? I know they weren’t the future, but at least you knew they’d get stuck in and dish some stick out, just to make the opposition think, which is what we’re sorely lacking.

Anyway, squad news and on our part, Kienan Davis and Tyrone Mings are back in contention.
Matt Targett is suffering a hamstring problem and the extent of it isn’t known yet, but I don’t think he’s much of a loss anyway, as he’s been awful of late.
As for Burnley, defender Ben Gibson and Aaron Lennon are back in contention. Johann Berg Gudmundsson will be pushing for more game time after making his second consecutive substitute appearance.

I have a connundrum.
If we’re not going to go gung-ho, surely this is a game where we should go 3-5-2?
Or more accurately 5-3-2, which I think is what the formation more often reflects.
To be honest, I don’t think formations are as solid as they used to be years ago, as they’re more fluid these days, with players moving well out of position and more following the play (which explains why our RB in particular is so often caught out of position), but we definitely line up with four at the back when defending under the current system.
Ideally Targett would have been available for the system to work at it’s best going forward, but he can’t defend for toffee anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
The point is, we add another defender to beef things up.
Either way, Elmohamady starts for me.

Or does Dean stick with the more flairy side of things and go for it?
We’re on a hiding to nothing, in my opinion.

But regardless, we cannot keep playing Jack Grealish on the left, as he has been sussed out in that position and teams just double or triple up on him, safe in the knowledge that there’s very little threat from the rest of the team.
He simply has to play in the middle, where he might well drift left, but the defenders can’t track him so easily.
The player himself has said out on the left is not his favoured position (but added that he’s happy to do the job, to keep Smith happy), after all.
And he has to play further forward, just behind a or the striker(s).
How long will it be before Smith sees that he’s wasted playing in our third of the pitch, as much as he’s probably more effective at tracking back recently than Targett is?

Okay, I hold my hands up in saying that I don’t have a clue as to how we can possibly win this game, but if Dean Smith sticks with his philosophy of being gung-ho, I think we’re going to be beaten easily.
I don’t see a big scoreline, because Sean Dyche is a canny manager and knows that he doesn’t need to win big.

I’m going for a very straightfoward 2-0 win for Burnley, although I hope, probably in vain that we can get something out of it.