Yesterday the boys travelled to Birmingham to play Aston Villa at Villa Park. We haven’t won a league game at Villa Park since the early 70’s and knowing that they so far is the only unbeaten team in the league this season didn’t really help to get my hopes up.

Villa started the game better than us and you could clearly see that Coleman had praised “safety first”. Even if Villa had slightly more possession they didn’t create many chances to score. Most of the time they hoofed the ball in to our box just to see it won by Pearce and Knight over and over again.

The ref for the day Chris Foy didn’t have one of his best days at all. First he “missed” a handball on Rosie and a few minutes later he did the same in the Villa box. Shortly after he made the poorest decision of the day, when he gave Villa a penalty out of the blue. It wasn’t even close to be a penalty, hardly even contact between Rosenior and Petrov. The decision has been criticised by Chris Coleman, and he’s backed by Martin O’Neil as well. Oh well, Villa and penalties hasn’t been a good combo lately but Barry stepped up and score a good penalty.

After the Villa goal Fulham started going forward a bit more and eventually got the well deserved goal. The scorer was very unlikely but it was truly nice to see the joy on his face after Moritz Volz scored his first league goal for Fulham. He got a good cross from Radzinski out left and score from a few meters. The Villa defenders did poorly when giving Volz so much space. But in all fairness, 1-1 was a pretty fair result at half time.

The second half started with Fulham being the better team and seemed more motivated than the home team. Even though Fulham tried going forward they failed to produce any high class chances. The best chance of the second half was a set piece from Villa but all four Villa players who went for the ball missed it and the ball went passed the goal mouth.

Surprisingly enough none of the teams seemed willing to go for all three points, I’m actually a bit disappointed that we didn’t change formation to 4-4-2 when we had them pinned back for a while.

At the end of the day, I’m pleased with one point away to Villa, and in a televised game. We’ve now gone three televised games in a row without losing; it has to be some sort of a Fulhamish record.