Nearly 33,000 of us rolled into Villa Park today not quite knowing what we would see. At 17:50 we had seen a confident cool performance from the team and whilst not a fluent attacking one we saw enough to know that confidence is slowly returning and this is the villa we like to see and have seen before.

there was not a bad performance today and even though Fulham ‘parked the bus’ we picked the correct system (4-2-1-2-1 !!) an we got the win with a ‘lucky’ own goal and a great finish from Gabby wth his left foot !!

Confident debut by Ciaran Clark

However the star of the show on his debut was Ciaran Clark on his debut and despite playing a toothless Fulham side it was still his first game against a top 7 team from last seasonso we can not deny it was a test. the kid has a long future in front of hm and if he keeps his head screwed on we have one heck of a player.

Another thing to note from today was that Ashley Young was not really playing on the left wing but was really a forward, I have no doubt when Downing is fit Young will play as the ‘support forward’ hence no need to buy another foward this summer