Aston Villa v West Ham United: match preview
- by Preview Percy
- Filed: Sunday, 26th January 2025
Preview Percy’s column isn’t the place you’d normally visit for political comment. And you are about to find out why. Here’s his look at Sunday’s trip to Villa Park...
Next up we pay our second visit to Villa Park within the space of a few weeks where we will, once again, be hosted by Aston Villa.
Lots of engineering work on the lines into Liverpool Street so if that’s your route in allow a bit of extra time. Also you may want to give yourself a few minutes given that their digital systems are about as useful as ours and there was chaos getting in last time. Better safe than sorry.
So Villa then. Well I went through their season in detail a couple of weeks back so I won’t run over old ground. Suffice to say that since we last met they have played twice in the league and once in the so-called Champions League.
On these shores they prevailed 1-0 up at Goodison Park before hilariously coming back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 with Arsenal. They were eighth before the Everton win after which they moved up to seventh. The draw at Arsenal saw them slip back to eighth again.
In the so-called Champions League they popped over to Monaco where they came away pointless after a 1-0 defeat. This dented their chances of going through to the last 16 phase of the ludicrously-structured competition. However, they could still qualify if they beat Celtic and others above them were to stumble. They are however guaranteed a play-off place.
Daisy informs me that they are one of the few clubs to have done any meaningful business this window. They signed another striker in the form of Donyell Malen, a £21m (plus addons) arrival from Borussia Dortmund. Oddly, he spent a couple of years meandering through the Arsenal youth system about 10 years ago having arrived from Ajax. He then went home where he made his name with PSV, eventually ending up in Dortmund in 2021.
He has 41 Dutch Caps and apparently his family all call him “Don”, which shows a disappointing lack of imagination on the nickname front.
Malen’s arrival has primed speculation over the future of Jhon Duran. Now we apparently made a bid in the summer but chose to pursue other options. Now it is being postulated that we made a much, much larger bid - £57m seems to be the figure touted – for the player’s services this winter.
If the scuttlebutt is correct this figure was rejected out of hand, the implication being that had we bid £57m back in the summer he’d have been a Hammer by now. If half of that is true it really doesn’t say too much about how our club is run. But there again there’s nothing new in that is there.
The other arrival was a young right back. Emery deciding that the area needed strengthening went to the owners and said “Bring Me The Head Of Andres Garcia”. Presumably asking for it to be attached to the rest of the player’s body at the same time. He’s spent all his time with Levante in the Spanish Second division and, at 21, is probably being groomed as one for the future.
On the injury front they will be without Torres (ankle) and Barkley (calf), whilst McGinn and Onana are both doubts with thigh injuries.
Given that we looked at Villa fairly recently, there’s not much more to say really so let’s move on to The Wild and Wacky World Of Association Football.
Now this column usually eschews political comment but the recent events in The USA did raise an eyebrow, in particular the fat orange one’s “First Buddy’s” repeated use of what one can only describe as a “Wayne Hennessy Salute”.
Hennessy you will recall was the former Palace ‘keeper who was captured making the self-same gesture. With added simulated moustache formed of fingers placed across the upper lip of course. Or, as Hennessy put it: “I was trying to wave to the bloke with the camera to get on with it, cupping my hand round my mouth to make my voice carry”.
I would offer that as an excuse to Mr Musk, but I suspect that he’d be more proud of being believed to have made a Nazi salute.
On the pitch, footage started “going viral” as I believe the kids put it of the latest in a rather disturbing trend amongst match officials of seeing things that don’t exist. Anthony Taylor is shown giving a free-kick as an Arsenal player is shown throwing himself to the floor with no other player within a yard of him.
Taylor is shown to have a clear line of sight of the players – indeed he’s in the perfect position to have known what was going on and appeared to have been looking straight at it. The reason why Taylor gave the free-kick should have been the subject of some sort of public explanation, but, as one of PGMOL’s fireproof elite he could probably get away with just saying “I felt like it”.
On to us then and what I think was our worst performance of the season. Yes, we conceded more goals against Liverpool and Arsenal but the aforementioned Taylor was in charge for those and any results in his matches ought to be marked with an asterisk much as athletics records are so marked where wind-assisted.
Frankly we were awful. The limited optimism gained from the recent improvement in performances seemed to have gone walkabout right from the start. We were tentative, nobody wanted to take anyone on and we seemed intent on taking three touches and two passes where one and one respectively would have been more the order of the day.
Mavropanos had a particular stinker – not for the first time. The problem is that when you have one of your central defenders who is terribly out of form it affects the other part of the pairing.
Kilman seems to spend so much time keeping an eye on what Mavropanos is meant to be doing that his own role is suffering. The way he backed off for the first goal was very atypical. Thank heavens we weren’t playing anyone good is all I can say about that.
Mavropanos will be missing this week thanks to picking up two yellows. No complaints about either though it would be interesting to hear why ref Bramall failed to issue yellow cards on the two other occasions feet were placed dangerously close to an opponent’s head.
This will mean another defensive reshuffle, with the club finally commenting on Todibo’s absence as being down to a vague calf injury that will take a few weeks to heal. All this will mean that Alvarez is favourite to move back into a role that he is known to have performed before elsewhere.
Elsewhere the injury list comprises the aforementioned Todibo, Bowen, Antonio, Fullkrug and Summerville. Of those Summerville is the most likely to make a welcome return, though the word out and about is that Bowen may be available for the Chelsea game at the start of February.
With all those injuries it is clear that reinforcements are required. Even with Mavropanos not suspended his form has been such that he clearly needs replacing.
We also need a striker as we have zero cover up front – Ings isn’t trusted to start and the experiment of starting Paqueta as a false-ish nine reminds me of when it was tried by Allardyce. It confused the hell out of Spurs the first time it was used but everyone was ready for it in the weeks that followed.
It’s therefore somewhat dispiriting to hear us linked with loads of different midfielders. Now there’s theory and counter theory with some of those links that the club are deliberately feeding misinformation to certain parties in order to trace the source of information leaks. All very petty.
Mind you some of the reaction towards the new boss has been something else. Not counting the Cup match we have had two games. Bit early even for knee-jerk reactions, guys.
So to the prediction then. Well the gadget Daisy bought me, the Predict-O-Matic-O-Tron keeps coming back with disclaimers every time I update it. When I fed in the result from Saturday it bleeped back at me “what? They ALL, had off days?”
I’ll give it another go though. Having fed in the various variables, taking into consideration that I may well be the next in line for a central defensive slot in the team at this rate and the fact that we are incredibly short on numbers, it’s come up with the same sort of pessimistic answer that I might have produced in half the time using pen and paper.
So, having witnessed how bad things were last week I can only plump for a defeat this time. So the £2.00 that I was going to spend on a stock of anti-hallucinogenic drugs to be put into match officials’ pre-match cuppas will instead be wagered, with heavy heart, on a 3-1 home win using the Winstone Auto-Wager App.
Enjoy the game!

When Last We met At Villa Park: Lost 2-1 FA Cup January 2025
It was all looking so good. 1-0 up and playing well. Then the injuries and the corner that only the sort of elsewhere-unemployable worker engaged by PGMOL as a matter of course could have given and suddenly we’re out of the cup.
Referee: Peter Bankes
Mixes up the current trend of seeing things that never happened with not seeing things that are plain as the nose on your face. His disgusting performance in our home draw against Newcastle last season should have seen him locked up. He probably got a pay rise.
Danger Man: Jhon Duran
The phrase “coming back to bite us on the bum” was made for this weekend.
Percy and Daisy’s Birmingham Fact Of The Week Type Thing
In looking up facts about these places sometimes you come across “facts” that quite frankly smack of desperation on the compiler’s part. So we raise our glasses to the compiler of “42 Interesting Facts About Birmingham, who was clearly struggling as early as Fact no.12 by finding a link with the Titanic. That being that the ill-fated ship’s anchor was made in the Black Country. That’s right, not actually IN Birmingham, but quite near it. Next week, we examine Rutland’s connection with the moon landings.
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