Aston Villa travel to Anfield this afternoon to play against one of the best forwards in England. Saurez has already scored 24 goals this season and is on target to breaking the Premier League goal tally record for the season. Can the Villa defence stop him this afternoon? Their job could be made more difficult with Sturridge recently returning from injury. He scored in last weeks 5-2 victory against Stoke. While Liverpool rejoice, Aston Villa are currently in mid-table and not in the best of form, winning only 1 from their last 7 games.
Paul Lambert has brought in two players on loan this week, Grant Holt joins from Wigan and Ryan Bertrand joins from Chelsea. Both are available and in the squad for today’s game.
Team News:
Liverpool will welcome back Sakho and Joe Allen after missing the last three games through injury. Defenders Joe Flanagan, Jose Enrique, Daniel Agger are all injured.
Holt and Bertrand are available for Aston Villa following their loan signings this week. Nathan Baker will miss out with a concussion that was obtained in last Mondays game against Arsenal.
Match Facts:
Liverpool won the reverse fixture against Villa back in August with their only shot on target of the game.
Christian Benteke has scored three goals in three Premier League appearances against Liverpool.
Aston Villa have lost just one of their last four Premier League visits to Anfield (W2 D1 L1).
Luis Saurez has scored 22 goals in 16 appearances this season – he had 10 after 16 games last season and five the season before.
No team has conceded fewer home goals than Liverpool this season in the Premier League (6).
Predicted Lineups:
Mignloet
Johnson-Sakho-Toure-Cissokho
Gerrard-Lucas
Henderson——–Coutinho
Saurez-Sturridge
Agbonlahor-Benteke
Bacuna
Delph-Westwood-El Ahmadi
Bertrand-Clark-Vlaar-Lowton
Guzan
Match Prediction:
Liverpool 2-1 Aston Villa
This was a great game last season, Aston Villa played 5 at the back yet somehow won the game 3-1. Can we see a repeat this weekend? I highly doubt it. Liverpool are in phenomenal form. If our defence can stop Saurez and Sturridge then we may have a chance, but that is much easier said then done!
lambert out
Wow. We drew 2-2 at anfield. After being 2 nil ahead and played a bit better because of other teams players.
Lambert out!
Modern day football unless your top. 6 sideand we ain’t unfortunately so get over it
Spot on md8 but we r in the minority too many posters having a wankfest because we played well for the fist time for 5 months. big wow
weres the block button
Oohah just why do you bother mate? You thought about becoming a nose? I suppose you could call it having a sect change.
Ok we all know he Int our player can you answer one question with a simple A or B.
Would you rather
A. Loan players and stay up.
Or
B sign no fucker and go down.
Answer (c) Moan for the f**king sake of it!
I forgot to put that one on sorry
A. Astonb6 as i said in another post recently.
But some of todays post match comments are evidence of our how low us fans expectations have become and what we deem to be a “great” result.
It would have been great if we found a manager who can get us to hold a 2-0 lead. Vtid
Mate I would have love the win but that was good result they have just won 7 in a row so we took a point would have prefered 3 but would have taken a draw before game all day long
????? MD8 but we played well, whats your beef?
Mate things are how they are you can be a traditionalist (see Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest / County, Leeds UTD) or be pragmatic and personally I prefer the latter .
No beef mate, i dunno just fancy a winge is all. Took us five months to play that well and we drew. Guess im gutted we couldnt hold on mate.
Agreed ohhah. Spot on
how proud am i ~ finally a performance at pool were 7 wins in a row until we come knocking ~ tactics were spot on and we fans must get behind um at home, cos they can play we saw it 2nite
4get this result, remember the performance cos we all know, we ROBBED by Scousers ~ u couldn’t make shit up ~ VTID
Proud , Proud, f,.’ng proud, that’s my club today, that’s Aston Villa you remember the team that Liverpool thought was a win for them today, Well I can walk into my social club and say we played well, OK I’m one of the fans that has said enough is enough Lambert has to go, was I wrong or what, I fucking don’t know, you tell me , Terry O great one, Oohah o wise disciple please tell me, what the fuck going on. Don’t say Lambert has to go , you’re like me dot com. I’m confused.
Let me enlighten you sir Bill. We did play well in fact very well it wasn’t an illusion or Barcelona playing in villa shirts it really was us. But typically the usual flaws are still there ie not being able to defend a lead and worst of all when we went 2.0 up we secretly knew it wouldn’t last. Well I didn’t anyway. By rights we were due a hammering today but against the top teams especially away we seem to perform better. Why? Simply because we are expected to get hammered 10.0 anyway and we have nothing to lose so no pressure. Also we are virtually safe from relegation and still would of stayed 11th today even if we lost 10.0. The problem is we need to translate that performance against the lesser teams around us especially at home ant that’s why we fail miserably because we are only effective going fwd in the counter we cannot break teams down when they defend in front of us. Yes I still want lamberk out one result changes nothing it’s the poor shit results wev had before that and in the end we still couldn’t win the game. We have made no progress in terms of points from last season either and our league position means diddly squat as teams below us are truly awful.
You conveniently forgot to say that cheatin, biting,racist twat dived (again). The ref bottled it, otherwise Brad would have been carded!
Guzman wasn’t carded as vlaar was behind him so was the last man
Oohah’s right it’s just papering over the cracks Lamberk out
We will not be relegated.
Fuck off Lerner and Red Bull the Villa is ours.
Nice one Langford.
Wasnt me mate lol 🙂
Lol love the user name.
I am not concerned about the opponents we played well today the best i have seen since last season, all i want to see as a Villa fan is passion and a level commitment, today i saw that and hopefully it will continue. Still got a long way to win me back but its a step in the right direction
But why is today the exception rather than the rule. Consistency is king in football.
Even when we beat man City i saw no glimmer, today i saw one let me enjoy it lol
Exactly we played well in 2nd half v arsenal but why wait till we are 2 down. It’s seems on average we have one good half and one bad half
Where did that performance come from?? I think I am still in shock. We havent been able to put 3 passes together since the start of the season and then we play like that!
We attacked well, passed the ball around, closed Liverpool down and got stuck in all over the field! Really unlucky not to win and we even had a decent amount of possession.
So much better when we dont play 5-3-2 and sit back deep, we pushed up and made Liverpool make mistakes. Vlaar, Delph, Benteke, Gabby and Guzan all played really well.
Still think Clark is a liability though and we do desperately need another top midfielder to play alongside Delph.
Overall though, although we blew a 2 goal lead was a good performance and a great result. Wonder if we can play like that 2 games in a row?!!!
Benno, you are right with your post. Surprising quality in this team. Hopefully they show us more of that in the future. I have to stress both loan players did exceptionally well. Bertrand was very good maybe a little bit tired at the end cause he hasn´t played a lot in this season. And Holt showed that he can hold the ball very well, has all the experience needed and some clever tricks and flicks.
This performance gives us hope and we have no reason to moan.
Yup, impressed with Bertrand, esp given lack of game time in the league this season. Holt held it up well, still would rather have him as back up for benteke and not as a part of a 4-3-3 with him!
I hope we can build on this and Lambert doesnt revert to his old negative tactics.
Have to say i am not a massive fan of KEA but today he did what he is best at and badgered the hell out of Liverpool, some of his passes did not come off but everytime he went for a player they were nervous and made mistakes.
I really thought we played extremely well against a team that has been in superb form at home all season. Suarez cheating was no surprise, neither was the referee buying it. But, proud of that performance, the first 45 was the best I’ve seen us play all season.
Bertrand is a huge improvement on Luna as well.
Of course its only one game, the key is to use this as a turning point to turn around the form. And Benteke is looking back to his old self, even Weimann looked far better today.
Btw, everyone heard Lowton was dropped for a disciplinary issue again, looks like he’s on his way out for sure. Something going on behind the scenes.
I bet every Villa fan shit themselves the moment Luna came on, I know i did
..morgan, that’s right he isn´t Prem league standard.