Key events
Half time: Aston Villa 0-0 Cardiff City
45+2 mins: Rashford sends in a corner, which falls at the feet of a Villa player but he’s facing the wrong direction and backheels into a defener. And that is basically that.
45+1 mins: There will be one minute of stoppage time.
45 mins: I’ve now seen a replay of that Cardiff penalty appeal and, well, I’ve seen them given. Bogarde kicks Ng’s foot, and maybe he was a little overkeen to go down, but it looked a bit fouly to me.
44 mins: And the 27th and 28th should have brought the breakthrough! Rashford heads the ball through to Watkins, who should have sent it either side of Horvath but instead sidefoots into him!
43 mins: Villa are now 26-1 up on touches-in-opponents’-penalty-area.
Cardiff touch the ball in the Villa penalty area!
42 mins: This is not a drill. The ball is chipped through to Ng, running into the box, who takes a touch and then goes down as Lamare Bogarde challenges. The referee hasn’t given the penalty, and play has continued.
41 mins: Cardiff do an attack! Giles leads it on the left, and the ball is worked to El Ghazi, about 25 yards out, who gets a little excited and takes a rubbish shot that rolls wide.
38 mins: I don’t know if ITV have placed their microphones a little mischievously, but I’ve only been able to hear Cardiff’s fans so far.
34 mins: Bailey gets to the byline and thumps the ball across goal. It flies to Rashford at the back post, but he can’t get his foot over the ball and as a result does get the ball over the bar!
33 mins: Save! A long diagonal pass to Asensio, whose control is ludicrously good but whose pass infield goes straight to Goutas. He half-clears to Bailey, who lashes a shot goalwards that Horvath beats away.
31 mins: A third of the game has been played, and Villa have had a lot of the ball but just one chance. “Is it just me or is there a kit clash here? I’m finding it hard to distinguish between the dark tops and white shorts. Why are they allowed to wear such similar colours?” wails Katharine. “Or maybe it’s just that Specsavers is calling me. I might book an appointment just to be on the safe side.” Both teams are wearing white shorts, but I’m finding the Cardiff blue and the Villa claret different enough not to get very confused.
29 mins: A pause while Robinson receives treatment after running into El Ghazi.
28 mins: Horvath dallies on the ball and then very nearly sidefoots it straight into Watkins with his left foot. Luckily the ball only grazes the Villa striker, and he gets away with it.
25 mins: The ball is played over the top of Villa’s defence towards El Ghazi, who goes down in the area under challenge from Maatsen. Cardiff look to the referee hoping for a penalty; he signals an offside.
24 mins: Villa have executed 74 successful passes in the final third. Cardiff have had one.
21 mins: Another pull-back from Rashford, but this time he’s pulling back Ng and Cardiff have a free kick and a bit of a breather.
20 mins: The ball is spending almost all of its time in Cardiff’s defensive third. Rashford does well on the left again and pulls back to Tielemans, but Ramsey throws himself in the way of the shot!
18 mins: Chance! Watkins is played in to the left of goal and tries to prod a shot past Horvath, but the keeper gets something on it and the ball dribbles wide!
17 mins: Another clever corner from Villa. It drops to Rashford, a couple of yards inside the penalty area, but he misses his kick.
15 mins: Cardiff continue to defend their area pretty well, but Villa’s attacking has been a bit imprecise so far – it feels like they’ve been as responsible for their moves breaking down as Cardiff’s defenders, but at some point they’re going to go a whole move without messing up.
12 mins: … from which Villa attempt to produce something they presumably worked on on the training pitches, and which presumably worked a bit better when they did. This time it’s played to Bailey, but badly enough for a Cardiff player to intercept it and boot clear.
11 mins: Now Rashford jinks and sprints to the byline, but his cross is cut out and deflects behind for a corner.
9 mins: Ethan Horvath makes his first save of the night, stopping Rashford’s 30-odd-yard free-kick with some ease.
6 mins: A nice cross from the left almost does the trick, but Bailey can’t quite reach it at the far post.
5 mins: Cardiff have dropped into a 5-4-1 formation when Villa have the ball, two lines on the edge of their penalty area, challenging Villa to find a way through them.
3 mins: The ball breaks to Bailey in the box, and he executes a very snazzy 360-degree spin. Doesn’t lead to much, but must have felt awesome.
2 mins: Perry Ng takes an age over a throw-in, and then chucks it at a teammate off whom it bounces into touch.
1 min: Peeeeeeep! Cardiff get the ball rolling.
The players are no longer in the tunnel. They’re on the pitch and Cardiff are huddling as I type. Villa don’t bother with that kind of thing. Anyway, football imminent!
The players are in the tunnel, where the referee is laying down some ground rules for the two captains.
Aaron Ramsey, who captains Cardiff after recovering from a hamstring injury, has a chat: “It’s a great competition and we’re really looking forward to this challenge. We know how tough it’s going to be. Hopefully it’ll be a memorable night for us. We know how difficult it’ll be but hopefully we’ll have one of those special FA Cup evenings.”
“We want to be as competitive as we can be in this game,” says the Cardiff manager Omer Riza, who has given the 19-year-old defender Dylan Lawlor a full debut. “They’ve put out a strong side so … it should be interesting. Anything can happen in the FA Cup. It’s a one-off situation. If we turn up and we do everything right that we can, you never know. It’s good character building.”
As exclusively revealed in the Guardian earlier this month, semi-automated offside technology is being trialled in this season’s FA Cup from the fifth round onwards. That means this will be the first game in the country to use it.
Team news
The teams are in, and these are the players who will decide this tie, with Emi Martinez declared fit to take his place in a strong Aston Villa side:
Aston Villa: Martinez, Garcia, Konsa, Bogarde, Maatsen, McGinn, Tielemans, Bailey, Asensio, Rashford, Watkins. Subs: Olsen, Digne, Rogers, Ramsey, Kamara, Rowe, Zych, Jimoh.
Cardiff: Horvath, Fish, Goutas, Lawlor, Ng, Ramsey, Colwill, Giles, El Ghazi, Willock, Robinson. Subs: Turner, O’Dowda, Mannsverk, Robertson, Salech, Bagan, Davies, Ashford, Nyakuhwa.
Referee: Peter Bankes.
Hello world!
“We are not a contender in the FA Cup to win the title,” said Villa boss Unai Emery ahead of this game. “We are not contenders. Why? Because there are other teams with more options than us to win this competition.”
Oh.
Ahead of this fifth-round tie it’s hard to read those comments and not just think, oh well sod it then, I’ll just read my book. But wait until you hear what Omer Riza had to say about his Cardiff side, enjoying a brief breather from the battle for Championship survival (they’re 19th, six points and quite a lot of goal difference above the bottom three):
“I’d like to put my strongest team out so you can have a real go at it – and if we were 12th in the league I’d have no issues with that,” Riza said. “But we have just got too many far more important games coming up, which are about surviving and staying in the Championship. Sometimes I think it [would have been] best that we went out in the third round. We’re definitely not rolling over and saying ‘take the game’, but it’s frustrating we can’t be at full-strength and have a real go at it.”
So what we have here is a game between a team that doesn’t want to be in the competition and another that thinks they might as well not be in it. And if that doesn’t get your juices flowing at the end of a long week I don’t know what will.
For what it’s worth I think Emery is wrong: the two best teams in the country (according to the league table) are already out of the Cup, Chelsea likewise, and the teams in sixth and eighth are playing each other on Sunday. Sure, Manchester City are still involved, have a helpful draw and look a bit ominous, but Villa look like very feasible cup-winners to me.
There are some injury issues right now, though. “Matty Cash, close, but we will see,” Emery said. “Pau [Torres] not, Tyrone Mings doubt, Emiliano Martinez doubt, Barkley not, Onana doubt, Kamara doubt, they are close to a come back but we will see. Malen is sick, hopefully he can recover. Being sick is different.” Their line-up tonight could be fearsome, or it could be a bit feeble.
None of this is very promising, I can’t lie. But stay with me! It’s a funny old game, and maybe this will turn out to be a good one.
