Norwich – Villa; A stupid Tuesday night game

It’s all a bit of a rush, this.
I’m coming home from work and discovered that we’re actually playing tonight, when I thought the game was tomorrow.
Premier league footy on a Tuesday? I didn’t know there was such a thing.

Anyway, the story here is that there are apparently two players who have tested positive for Covid.
Rumour has it and I also heard the same rumour on WM that it’s Martinez and Konsa.
Losing Martinez is a blow, but I think Jed Steer is a competent back up goalie and I’m sure he’d be well up for returning to the club where he played as a kid in Norwich’s academy.
Losing Konsa on the other hand is a bigger loss. I know we have Hause and Tuanzebe as back up for him, but Tuanzebe in particular is nowhere near the same quality. Not that conceding should be our big problem here.
I was shocked to see that Norwich have only scored 8 goals so far into this season.

And then the other big issue is that Nakamba suffered a knee injury against Liverpool and has to see a specialist to see if he needs to go under the knife. If he does, he faces being out for the rest of the season. Just as he’s beginning to win those who don’t rate him over too. You couldn’t make it up.
Hopefully all the doom-mongering talk is just that, as we often see on the click-bait sites and he’ll only be out for a short while.
Otherwise, I think nothing else has changed.

Norwich are missing Grant Hanley, Christop Zimmermann, Andrew Omobamidele, Milot Rashica, Christos Tzolis and Mathias Norman.
I have to be honest, I know nothing about any of them, so how much that affects the side, I don’t know.

So Jed goes back to his home club, Buendia returns to the club where he shone so brightly last season and of course Dean Smith manages our opponents.
Will he have enough knowledge about the Villa to be able to wangle a victory? It might be a nice thought for him (as much as he loves the Villa), but I don’t see it happening.
8 goals in 16 games is horrendous, simple as.
And while I thought they’d been doing much better under Smith, the reality is that they’ve won 1, drawn 2 and lost 2.
So they’re only doing better because they were so downright awful before.

So while Norwich have only scored 0.5 goals a game, they’ve also conceded 2 per game.

Those figures alone tell me that we should have this one in the bag.
But with Smith having plenty of incentive and the fact that they have been doing better of late, it doesn’t mean anything is guaranteed.

I’m going to give Norwich the benefit, because we are always open to conceding, plus the fact that I like Pukki and say that they’ll get a goal.
But we’re capable of scoring if we can get the ball into their box often enough. There’s no way Stevie G will show the same amount of respect that he has done against Pool, Man City and Leicester, meaning we should go for it just a little bit more.

Of course, you always have to be careful, but I just seeing us having too much for Norwich.
Then again, I watched a large part of the Norwich-Man U game and the reds struggled to get the victory.
That said, I don’t rate them, so that’s meaningless.

2-1 to the Villa it is. I’m pretty convinced.

UTV!