Last week, I was fully confident that we had enough about us to beat a Stoke team that had been in poor form and had a decent amount of injuries.
While I never thought we were good enough to have deserved all three points, the game had “one each” written all over it, a point that would have at least been encouraging.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t see the game out and we all know what happened.
Heartbreaking stuff, it was too.
This week, however, I have absolutely no faith whatsoever that we’ll take anything from St James’ Park or whatever they call it these days.
Whichever way you look at our stats over recent months, they’re simply appalling;
We’re the only team in the top four divisions that hasn’t won in 2015.
We’ve gone 11 games without a win and in that time, we’ve scored 3 goals.
And while previous games don’t count for anything, we also have a poor record against Newcastle since we beat them 3-0 on their turf.
All in all, things just don’t bode well, in my opinion.
That said, that’s what we’ve brought Tim Sherwood in for; to try and revitalise us.
I still keep going back to the fact that we need six wins from our remaining games, even though we’ve only won five up to now, though.
On to squad news then and it’s not good.
Vlaar serves a ban, which might be just as well, as I suspect Sherwood might have dropped him anyway.
The bigger concerns are that Cissokho and Hutton are both doubtful.
I wonder if we might see Bacuna in at RB?
Kieran Richardson, who to be fair, has done reasonably well at LB, is out too and there’s talk that Lewis Kinsella might start.
Newcastle might have Jonas Gutierrez back, but Cheick Tiote and Jack Colback are both out.
For me, it’s all about who gets the first goal today and I just don’t see us scoring it.
Whatever, I think we’ll see what this Villa team is all about today, in whether we have the bottle to fight our way out of trouble, or not.
Let’s hope I have something decent to write about after the game, eh?
Newcastle 2-0 Villa.
