Jonny Nicholson: Villa and Southampton should have points deducted for dreadful showing

The Friday night game was enough to cure insomnia while Forest fail to gel and Arsenal impress. 

SUITED AND BOOTED: Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard and Saints coach Ralf Hasenhüttl on the sideline on Friday night. 

Aston Villa and Southampton’s somnambulant soccer

The Premier League is never slow to market itself as an elite league playing irresistible elite football that is worth paying through the nose to watch. This propaganda is absorbed into the football body politic and sends pundits out into the world to tell us that ‘for me, Jeff, it’s the best league in the world’. Well, such people will want to forget the Villa v Saints game on Friday night as quickly as possible because it bursts this peculiar delusion. A truly dreadful spectacle where no side could seem to even pass the ball accurately, let alone do anything creative with it. Of course, this happens in football at all levels, we all understand that, but having something sold to you as elite but which looks very like a fourth tier game only stripped of the fun and four times as expensive, is a tad galling. So bad was the football that fans audibly groaned when five minutes of extra time were announced. What fresh hell was this? Villa won, but football was the loser. Both sides deserved to have points deducted for bringing the game into disrepute. Afterwards, John McGinn declared he would’ve turned off the TV if he’d been watching, by which time, almost nobody was.