Aston Villa at Wigan: Short preview and prediction

Wigan have drawn the same and only lost one more than Stoke have at home this season so it must be a hard place to go, so I guess some will happily take a point tomorrow night. I won't, not at Wigan, a place where we have only ever lost once.

If it we were playing at Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford or The Library, I'd take a point before the game but nowhere else. I'm sorry if you think my expectations are unrealistic, but against every other team, away from Villa Park, I think if we are to have aspirations of top four then we have to have aspirations of winning.

So, we go to Wigan tomorrow where we won 4-0 last season and most actually have it down as an away win on our prediction page but there are a fair few that think it will be a draw also. I predicted a draw, so chances are that you should put your money on anything but draw and at 23/10 for Wigan and 6/5 for us, if one of those come in, you'll be happy.

Early Team Prediction

Nobody went off injured against Stoke so expect the same players to start against Wigan or expect Gabby to start for either Carew or Heskey. O'Neill has now tried the Heskey and Carew experiment and he can easily change without upsetting anyone. Do expect a player to keel over for O'Neill one day before the end of the season though from sheer exhaustion.

On the other hand, O'Neill might surprise us. He might call up Albrighton and give Webcam or Downing a rest. He might play Delph instead of Petrov or Milner and he might play Young at right back and give one of the three centre backs on the pitch a rest. He might.

Prediction

I thought we'd beat Stoke and I've already mentioned that I predicted we would draw this one, so I think that is the one result it won't be, but I'm not going to jinx it by saying anything else, I will stand by my draw prediction although this really is a place we should be going and winning.

Aston Villa News

Some links below to some stories that you might be interested in.

At the end of the day, we have eleven games left and we are 16 points off where we finished last season. We will get 17 points from these eleven games, just to do better with actual points than last season, which means we are going to lose two of them, win four of them and we will draw the rest.

Tomorrow will be interesting. Live updates and all the regular stuff here from about 6pm.