NOT a Villa match thread

He's nowhere near as good with the ball at his feet has Stan was. If you want comparison it's the shooting but not passing or touch of Kane with the strength and running of Lukaku/Shearer. It's push and run rather than dribble at pace around 6 cones.

Stan is the best player I've ever watched live. Delap's goal was reminiscent of an average* Collymore goal.

*Good

If he’d scored on that near post header, it would have been quite the performance. As it was, I was impressed.

And I like Schlager and McAtee as a pairing, I’m just not sure which one you drop (if needed) for Sangare.

You probably drop the one who can't spray the deft pinged balls while turning on a sixpence, because Sangare can't do that either. But neither of them need to worry about being dropped at the moment, they're looking like a real partnership. Sangare will get plenty of matchtime if be stays fit, but probably mainly from the bench.

So many good performances today. Notably for me McAtee, Schlager and Delap.

Schlager has shown much more than I expected from him. Brings the ball forward. Wins it. Street wise. He's just very decent at most stuff.

McAtee is quickly morphing into Adam Wharton. It's bizarre but long may it continue.

We might need to start worrying about the City buy back clause if the trajectory continues because I bet it's now looking pretty cheap by 2026 standards.

Again, haven't seen the game yet. But the internet opinion, and as we know the internet never lies, is that McAtee was very lucky to be on the pitch after his tackle on Maatsen.

Calm with the ball at keeping possession in deep midfield areas. Good at finding passes into the forwards though the lines. Everything goes through him.

Wharton doesn't actually do that much battling/tackling does he?

I think the Wharton thing is less about a checklist of actions than the geometry of how McAtee is beginning to see midfield. He’s playing much more inside the picture now, rather than receiving at the end of it.

Liverpool and Spurs were quite revealing in that respect. He’s starting to invite pressure rather than merely survive it, using his first touch and body orientation to alter where the next space appears. The pass afterwards can look fairly innocuous, but often the important action has already happened. That’s why I’m not especially troubled by the relative lack of obvious switches or long diagonals.

Defensively I think the criticism is fair but perhaps slightly event-led. His tackling can look secondary because increasingly his job is to occupy the space that determines where the first duel happens, rather than necessarily be the player making it. He still misreads that space at times, unquestionably, but that feels developmental rather than structurally incompatible with the role.

Wharton is obviously much further along in all of this, particularly in seeing the game before receiving it. But there’s something recognisable in McAtee’s recent change, less emphasis on what he can do once he gets the ball, more on what his positioning and reception can make the opposition do before he gets it.

That’s probably where I see a comparison. Not really stylistic mimicry, more a similar way of gradually making midfield about space and sequence rather than individual actions.

Schlager probably makes the experiment more coherent as well. Not because McAtee can’t win the ball, he increasingly does, but because Schlager gives the midfield a more instinctive defensive reference point, allowing McAtee’s aggression to be more selective. There’s a potentially nice asymmetry to it - Schlager compresses the game, McAtee interprets the space that compression creates. They could end up being quite complementary without falling into the simplistic destroyer/creator split.

It's not an experiment I would have thought of, and I doubt many other managers would have seen it, but it's now the main reason that I am excited about Glasner because it is genuinely inventive. I worry about that buy back.

Forget it, can't be arsed to start an argument.

This is nonsense. He wouldn't make their bench today.