Ratings & Reactions: Villa v AZ Alkmaar

[Jas10]

 

[It's Your Round]

Tricky game that felt quite flat at times. Thought Tielemans was excellent, and Diego and Lenglet too. I always felt we’d take the points but it took the extra quality from Dougie to unlock the defence, that kind of quality is expensive and worth so much to this team. Great finish from Watkins too. 

[imavillan]

dog of the match.....woof woof 

[mykeyb]

30 minutes ago, Lerner's Driver said:

Scraped it.

Thank you Dougie.

We need more urgency AND to be more accurate in our final third passing.

 

This time a million

[tonyh29]

Dominated the first half without getting into second gear but lacked that final ball … then AZ briefly turned into Brazil and played some quick one touch passing football and we kinda lost our way for a bit

Couldn’t rewind it on my choice of viewing but coulda have sworn they gave thier goal after a VAR check and then drew the lines showing him offside , but didn’t matter in the end 

shown again though that once we adjust the main 11 by more than one or two players our system kinda falls apart a bit , something to work on before Athens 

crowd needs to be more vocal v Warsaw though 

 

[Demitri_C]

10 minutes ago, ender4 said:

No, we don’t qualify!!

We go into a play-off round against Europa League opponents. The winner of those 2 games, which could be someone like say Ajax or Brighton, qualify for the knockout stages. 

Your wrong

We dont go out coming 2nd do we?? We advance to next stage which is play off round. Finishing top is more of  "bye" and you advance one round more

[Xela]

 

[ender4]

2 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Your wrong

We dont go out coming 2nd do we?? We advance to next stage which is play off round. Finishing top is more of  "bye" and you advance one round more

Ok, we’ll agree to disagree as I’m 100% confident we don’t advance to the next round if we finish second.

But now you’re playing with words to try and convince yourself otherwise. When have you heard of qualifying out of a group stage as a “bye”

Anyway, I think we’ll finish top so we’ll never find out what happens when someone finishes second lol.

[Jonesy7211]

We were flat, but I felt that they put us off our game with a lot of cynical fouls that weren't punished correctly. They should have a lot of yellows. Ref was awful.

[troon_villan]

41 minutes ago, AvfcRigo82 said:

Not sure what game @troon_villan was watching to rate Emery's performance as Very Poor and the Ref's as Very good.

Someone's had a few stiff ones tonight!   

Ffs I always thought these were anonymous hahaha!!

[bannedfromHandV]

Result is all that matters but we certainly got a tad lucky with that corner, terrible miss from Kamara.

They played our high line with some intelligence, it still didn’t work for 90% of the time but they got their goal and I wasn’t sure we’d get back into it at that point. Great to see Diego score finally, he was walking round on the pitch at the end so assuming his injury is nothing too serious. Second goal was well crafted and well taken.

Puts us in a great position now, hopefully we play a bit better against Legia.

[East London Villa]

I thought we were good for the first half hour and should have scored a couple of goals. After that AZ came back into it and reminded us they are a decent team. A moment of quality from 2 of our best players was enough and we saw it out professionally.

Good that we can prove we can win from behind against a packed defence, as I think that is still a bit of a mental block for this squad.

Beat Legia by more than 1 goal, we guarantee top of the group and no play-off round. That has to be the focus for the next game. It would also allow us to leave our best players at home for the trip to Bosnia with no consequences, rather than take them on a 3,500 mile round trip in midweek after 5 tough games in 14 days ending in Arsenal and Man City.

Also a word for Leon Bailey - his delivery from set pieces and crosses on the right was excellent.

Edited November 9, 2023 by East London Villa

[smg]

7 minutes ago, It's Your Round said:

Tricky game that felt quite flat at times. 

The Villa Park crowd ( like Villa talk) is a reactionary crowd even when we score it’s a couple of chants one of which is usually about the blues (why?) and then back to silence and grumbles. There will always be the argument that it’s the teams job to get the fans going but surely if the crowd were more proactive and got behind the team for longer then the players are more likely to respond with positive actions on the pitch. We have waited for years to get back into European football why are we not enjoying it more and driving the players on ?

[NurembergVillan]

27 minutes ago, imavillan said:

dog of the match.....woof woof 

Dogleash Luiz

[HKP90]

44 minutes ago, The_Steve said:

Good to see Ollie calling out why our goal was disallowed and said the officials admitted to a mistake

Wait till he sees the replay of theirs.

[jimmygreaves]

Did they look at the onside offside call for their goal "in the studio" after the game? 

I have no idea why it wasn't called for offside.

[StewieGriffin]

To simplify;

Group Winners qualify for the Round of 16

Group Runners Up play a 2 legged tie against 3rd placed teams from Europa League groups, in what is essentially Last 32. If you win that tie, you play a Group Winner in Round of 16.

I thought we played ok in spells tonight, looked a bit laboured and slow at times but some of that was down to AZ having a better shape this time instead of the mess they were 2 weeks ago. They had a plan to draw us forward, force a turnover and play it down/over the channels to exploit the high line. I'm not sure they're quite as good as last seasons semi final and this seasons league results paint them to be - they've struggled in this group, and are most likely going out.

Should win the group from here, but Legia will try and do what AZ did tonight but without the pressure of needing to win the game.

[StewieGriffin]

8 minutes ago, NurembergVillan said:

Dogleash Luiz

Doggo Carlos

Collie Watkins

Lucas Dogne

[Tomaszk]

Only watched last 30 mins and thought we looked very good.

[DevonIsAPlaceOnEarth]

Knee jerk reaction is to say that that wasn’t a great performance, but must remember that Alkmaar were semi finalists last year and are going well domestically this year. They’re no mugs.