Analysis: Aston Villa thriller acts as a blast from the past for the fans
For Villa supporters who recall the last time their club seriously competed for Champions League football, Saturday will have sent a shiver down the spine.
Just three days after Unai Emery took a calculated risk in naming a much-changed team at Manchester City, his strongest available line-up inexplicably let slip a two-goal lead against Brentford to only draw a match in which victory had looked assured.
Echoes of 2009, when Villa conceded twice in the closing minutes of an infamous 2-2 draw with Stoke, in the first match after Martin O’Neill had sacrificed the club’s Europa League ambitions against CSKA Moscow, were impossible to escape.
Yet just as circumstances in Manchester last Wednesday were very different to Russia, so Saturday’s comparison is far from perfect, not least because on this occasion it was actually Villa having the final say, Ollie Watkins’ equaliser ensuring Emery’s men did not suffer a complete meltdown after Brentford had struck three times in nine minutes of second-half madness.
Eerily similar though the final result was, it came more than a month later in the season than 15 years ago, with Villa in a stronger position. Emery’s team probably need to win just two of their final six league fixtures to secure the top-five finish which will, in all probability, be enough for a place in Europe’s premier competition next season. Further progression in the Europa Conference League, thereby boosting the Premier League’s co-efficient ranking, will help their own cause.
Such facts won’t have been enough on Saturday evening to ease the nerves of a fanbase with an inbuilt fatalism, the result of generations raised on the belief the good times can’t last and that eventually, something will go wrong.
