Before taking his Aston Villa side to Selhurst Park, Steven Gerrard could not help but reflect on how the Premier League has changed since the days when he and his Crystal Palace counterpart, Patrick Vieira, used to dominate the middle of the park.
It would be unlikely, he conceded, for a midfield powerhouse to career through opponents in the manner of the mid-00s legendary duo in the current refereeing climate.
The Villa Gerrard took charge of three weeks ago are not the club he faced 27 times as a player, scoring 13 goals, though they are in need of many of the same qualities he embodied in his playing days.
So the afternoon began with a display of ruthlessness, though not an arbitrary one. Danny Ings and Emiliano Buendia found themselves dropped to the bench, replaced by Ashley Young and Leon Bailey.
With one team selection, Gerrard began to tackle the defining issue post-Grealish. It is too late to retrieve most of the £100m received from the club’s record sale to Manchester City, most of which was spent on procuring Bailey, Buendia and Ings. Of the trio, only Ings has had close to the desired impact, but it has come at a cost too, Villa on occasion lacking width in favour of the target man.
Ings’ goals (albeit there are only three of them from 10 league games) explain, to some extent, why Dean Smith was so hesitant to remove the England international from a starting role. There was still Ollie Watkins, who does not offer the same hold-up play but who does not diminish Villa’s ability to finish chances.
When the opening did come against Palace, it was via a simpler route. Vieira has had longer in the job, but he has been similarly influential in south London. What he is yet to perfect is the Eagles’ preparations from set pieces and predictably, Matt Targett found himself clear of James Tomkins to lash through the legs of Cheikhou Kouyate and past Vicente Guaita.
It was Young who provided the cross, becoming Villa’s all-time leading assist provider in Premier League history – evidence that one of Gerrard’s tweaks had paid off.
The other, the reintroduction of Bailey, did not. While it looks set to be a long process by which the 24-year-old will adapt to English football (though he played in a similar system at Bayer Leverkusen, which should help), this was not an effective audition in front of the new manager. He constantly overran in possession and lost the ball 13 times before being replaced with Anwar El Ghazi with a quarter of an hour left.
When Villa doubled their lead, it was not through any such attempts to unpick the lock as Bailey had been attempting, but through a curling effort from the edge of the box by John McGinn. That was arguably against the run of play, but it meant that Marc Guehi’s injury time reply for the hosts was in vain.
Comparisons with Smith would be premature. While his successor faces many of the same challenges in restoring Villa’s creative spark without the individual panache of Grealish, Gerrard does boast a significant advantage in that he starts from a place of greater depth – as evidenced by a bench featuring Axel Tuanzebe, El Ghazi, Ings, Buendia and Douglas Luiz – though Luiz had VAR to thank for rescinding a red card which was reduced to yellow.
At Rangers, creativity often came from unusual sources; in Gerrard’s last full season, full-back James Tavernier was top scorer in all competitions with 19 goals.
South of the border the answers are likely to be more straightforward and he is at least probing them and questioning the accepted wisdom in ways that Smith had stopped doing by the end of his reign.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3xvkTbH
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