Preston – Villa; Bring it on!

I’ve just read an interesting stat that says today’s game will be the first we’ve played against a lower half of the table team in nearly two months.
If that’s so, it just confirms my thinking that we’ve done pretty well recently.

It seems today’s game is about injuries as much as anything, with the Villa having four players, in Jack Grealish, Axel Tuanzebe, Neil Taylor and Henri Lansbury all out. Callum O’Hare is also expected to be unavailable.
That said, given that two of those were very unlikely to feature anyway, I don’t think that’s too bad.
While it shows how important Grealish and Tuanzebe are for us, I’d hardly call it a crisis, as our injury list seems to be being portrayed.

If you disagree with that, fair enough, but my point is that we’ve done ok without them.
To put things in perspective, Preston will be missing nine senior players, with Ben Davies, Callum Robinson, Brandon Barker, Sean Maguire, Josh Harrop and Billy Bodin and more, all unavailable.
That list definitely seems to have affected their form and they’ve struggled recently, with 2 wins, a draw and 3 defeats (including 2 at home) in their last six.
One of those wins was away to Forest, but it seems the Reds are on the verge of sacking Karanka, so that’s probably not saying much.

Which all in all, while I hate to count my chickens, makes this look like a definite win for us.
Of course you never know, but 3 points is the logical outcome and I just think that with our attack, we’ll just have too much for them to handle.
That’s becoming a bit of a re-curring theme lately, but I don’t care.
It makes a pleasant change to be on a roll of optimism.

Plus this is exactly the sort of game we have to win if we’re to prove our promotion credentials.

A prediction then and I think we’ll score more than 1.
2-1 to us, but I’ll take any win.