And so the Stadium of Stone for our 205th competitive match with Aston Villa in the Tailend Charlie event of Saturday’s Premier League programme. This match will bring together the two PL managers with the most luxuriant, glossy and immovable heads of hair. It must be a Basque thing.

Unai Emery, once of this parish, has won three of the six encounters between the two men. There has been one draw, which means — not the most testing of arithmetic — that Arteta won the other two. Ours is the man in form, winning the most recent game at their gaff earlier this season.

The very first game at ours was also the inaugural meeting of the two clubs, as it took place in our debut season in the old First Division. On a sunny but windy October 8, 1904, we won 1-0 before a crowd of upwards of 30,000 at the Manor Ground, Plumstead. In the 65th minute, Bill Gooing, who had notched up more than 80 league goals over the previous three seasons in the Second Division, scored from close range after Villa’s keeper, Billy George, had got a foot to a shot from Tim Coleman. 

Coleman’s footnote in football history was to be one of a handful of holdouts who maintained their membership of the Players Union, formed to fight the Football League’s recently imposed maximum wage of £4 a week (£628 in today’s money; not £628,000 a week, please note, Mr Haaland). The league was supported by the ever-progressive FA, which banned players from being members of the union, and Coleman’s stance probably restricted his England caps to the one he got in 1907.

‘Following [Coleman’s goal], the Arsenal showed great dash, quite overplaying the Villa, who never settled down’, reported The Umpire, a Sunday newspaper that billed itself, splendidly, as a ‘Sporting, Athletic, Theatrical and General Newspaper’. Its successors, one of which bore the even more splendid masthead of The Empire News and The Umpire, would eventually be absorbed into the News of the World. One could detect an inkling of that fate in the small ads on the back page of the October 9, 1904 edition, one of which was for ‘Rubber appliances…for both sexes, sent free in plain cover…All communications strictly private’. Nor was it the only ad of that ilk. The monks made their excuses and left.

We digress. It was the Daily Mirror’s report that echoes down through the years. Let me quote its second paragraph:

All the draughtboard-like work between the forwards and half-backs; the cunningly-contrived schemes to defeat, first half-back, and then back; all the finesse that one could wish to see were there, but on top of all, just like the ‘Spurs of Tottenham, the Villa forwards, after leading up the most elaborate openings, simply could not shoot. How often this defect occurs in ultra-scientific sides. I often think that in cases of this kind it would be well to sacrifice some of the combination, and have a rough diamond in the side in one of the inside forward positions, who could be relied upon to shoot hard, and at every opportunity.

For Villa 1904-05, read Arsenal 2024-25. Beyond the gratuitous dig at the neighbours’ incompetence — some things clearly never change — the Plan B hoped for by the Mirror’s anonymous correspondent could apply to our modern team. It matches the sentiments expressed of late by any number of the denizens of this fine establishment. What price an Edwardian Delap, Sesko or Osimhen?

Emery

Since taking over in November 2022, Emery has elevated Villa from 16th in the PL to Champions League football. Only Pep and Arteta have won more PL points in that time. However, this season, Villa has blown hot and cold. It sits seventh in the table, having won ten, drawn five and lost six of its 21 games, although it is unbeaten in its last three. On Wednesday, it won the latest edition of the most frequently played fixture in English top-flight football, grinding out a 1-0 win at Goodison Park over an even more vapid Everton to ruin Moyes’s return. 

It was Villa’s first away clean sheet of the season. Some commentators have suggested that Villa is struggling to cope with the additional strain of CL football. 

Another reason could be the summer sales of Moussa Diaby to Al-Ittihad and Douglas Luiz to Juventus. Both were key components of Emery’s midfield last season. Half the £110 million the pair raised was spent on bringing the giant DM Amadou Onana in from Everton, but he has taken time to settle. Ollie Watkins’ form has dipped this season, too, although he found his shooting boots on Wednesday.

Emery has settled back into playing 4-2-3-1 after some early season experiments with playing two banks of four; he went 4-4-2 when we visited Villa Park in August, for example. Who knows how he will set up on Saturday, but the fashion is to flood the centre with bodies to stop us from working through the opponent’s final third.

The opposition

Emi Martinez, another formerly of this parish, will be the glove butler. After a minor injury, he returned for Villa’s midweek game.

First-choice centre-backs Pau Torres and Diego Costa are off games, so the back four will likely comprise the familiar names of Matty Cash, Ezri Konza, Tyrone Mings and Lucas Digne or Ian Maatsen, another summer arrival who has struggled to cement a place in the starting line-up. 

Onana will likely be partnered in the double pivot in front of them by Boubacar Kamara, with Ross Barkley missing because of injury. Ahead of them, the likely starters are the pacey winger Leon Bailey, Belgian international Youri Tielemans and Morgan Rogers, who is having a breakthrough season.

Emery has good midfield options from the bench in Emiliano Buendia and young Jacob Ramsey, who is being eased back into the team after injury. However, the feisty Scot, club captain John McGinn is out with a hamstring injury, and Ipswich has bought Jaden Philogene for £20 million. That has paid for Dutch winger Donyell Malen, newly signed from Borussia Dortmund for a reported £19 million plus £2.5 million in add-ons. We sold Malen as an 18-year-old to PSV in 2017 for £500,000. Emery hints that Malen will get some debut minutes on Saturday.

Up top, Villa will have Ollie Watkins, who is starting to recover the form that made him such a potent striker last season but has been missing for much of this. Colombian super sub Jhon Duran, available but unused against Everton after a three-match ban for violent conduct, will undoubtedly come on at some point. 

The Arsenal

The rosy glow from Wednesday’s NLD still lingers, but on the principle that you are only as good as your next game, the team will have to knuckle down to another stiff test that again must yield all three points.

Despite no relief on the injury front — i.e., none of Jesùs, Saka, Nwaneri, Tomiyasu or White will be available, nor Calafiori by the sound of it — I still fancy Arteta to rest and rotate where he can. Thus:

Raya

Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Lewis-Skelly 

Ødegaard, Jorginho, Merino

Sterling, Havertz, Martinelli

This might be a game to start Tierney at left back, with Lewis-Skelly allowed to rest that smile. I pencilled in Sterling for a start, not so much because his Wednesday performance justifies it, but because, in fairness, he probably needs a run of starts if he is to get up to full speed — and Arteta doesn’t have many alternatives unless he throws in a youngster like Ismeal Kabia or Nathan Butler-Oyedeji. They both trained with the first-team squad pre-game, as did striker Khayon Edwards. Nonetheless, Sterling does have to start showing that he is not a spent force.

I expect Villa to be well-organised and combative. Emery will aim for a successive clean sheet and to score on the counter, as his team did so devastatingly during their last visit. Some Villa fans suggest that a draw would be a satisfactory result. However, we cannot afford to let any points slip (and we shall know the Scousers’ result at Brentford before kick-off). 

If we can recapture the vim and vigour of Wednesday and the crowd is as loud, a 2-0 victory seems achievable. North London Forever again sung to the rafters in celebration after the final whistle would be simply splendid.

Enjoy the game, ‘holics, near and far.