Aston Villa in relegation zone, important games coming up could be an understatement

A lot has been said and written the last couple of days, but one thing worth pointing out is this; nobody expected us to get anything out of Manchester United and Manchester City. That isn't to say that people can not be a little annoyed.

Before the game, the manager spoke about going out to win the game. From what I saw, we sat back for most of it and he only changed things around at two down. Okay, the second should never have been a penalty and he could have just been about to change things round, but you don't score three at Manchester City in the league and two would haven extremely impressive.

Which sort of confirms why he played the way he played; hoping to get something on the counter and you can't blame him for doing it, although you are free to question it and the merits of inviting a team like Manchester City to have pretty much complete control of the ball for ninety minutes.

Some stats

But get this; we had as many shots on target as Manchester City. That is the one stat I'm going to take from the game, because even though we sat back, we could have done better. Okay, Manchester City had more than double the shots we had in total, but if they're not on target, they're just passes.

More important things

But that isn't what we should be talking about today. Nobody expected to get anything from the last two games but we did expect to get something from Fulham and Southampton and probably more from Norwich and West Brom and please, some one say that West Brom are flying, because that is my point - they have a new manager too!

And the reason why those results are more important is because today, we find ourselves in the relegation zone.

And, in case you haven't looked at the table recently, if we don't beat Arsenal we could slip even further into the relegation zone and then we have matches against Reading and QPR that could very well define this manager.

Aston Villa in relegation zone

Defining define

What I mean by that is this; whichever way you want to dress it up, we need six points against Reading and QPR and nothing else will do, but if we don't get them, we quite literally could find ourselves at the bottom of the table in December and don't start looking at how many teams were bottom of the table in December and survived; the results are not very pleasing.

So when I write that the two results after Arsenal could define this manager, it's only because if we don't get them, we could be in serious trouble. And now I've written this, we'll win the next three.