Gavin Cooney

ASTON VILLA REMAIN the Premier League’s xG killers, while Manchester United remain a mystery even to themselves. 

This was Villa’s 11th win in a row but truthfully a battered and patched-up United deserved a draw, and they would have got it had Matheus Cunha not glanced a header wide from the middle of the six-yard box. United trailed at that point, thanks to a couple of stunning curled shots by Morgan Rogers, who is making the notion of him starting ahead of Jude Bellingham at the World Cup less fanciful with every passing week. 

Unai Emery skipped happily down the touchline at full-time, smiling and giving supporters a busy, we’re-only-just-getting-started-here kind of wave. That Villa are legitimately in the title race at the moment is a kind of wonder, and a testament both to Emery’s genius for unity and Rogers’ individual brilliance. 

But sorry, Villa fans, for we are professionally-bound to ask the miserable question. For how much longer can this go on? Villa are third in the league, a point from Man City and three points off Arsenal. But were you to organise the table according to the difference in teams Expected Goals and Expected Goals Conceded, then Arsenal would be top, City would be second. . . and Villa would be 14th.

So what the hell are we seeing here? First of all, xG is merely a map of the pitch that calculates the probability anyone would have scoring from a certain position. This is, of course, extremely flawed, as Rogers has shown. When you have a guy this good, you don’t need to be feeding him a series of gilt-edged chances to score.

First it was Cole Palmer, now it’s Rogers: the Manchester City academy sure is beginning to deliver for their rivals. 

So while Villa have the individual quality to outperfom their xG, the scale to which they are outstripping it is, by all precedence on record, unsustainable. But even if Villa do fall away from City and Arsenal at the top, their nine-point buffer to sixth place means they have given themselves an excellent chance of returning to next season’s Champions League.

This, given their strait-jacketed summer transfer business, would be an outstanding achievement on Emery’s behalf, and is the kind of performance that should leave other European pretenders shifting uncomfortably in their seats, namely Thomas Frank at Spurs and especially Eddie Howe at Newcastle, whose team has not developed anything like the flexibility and development Emery’s Villa have.

Third in this xG table, by the way, are Manchester United, which goes to accentuate their improvement under Ruben Amorim this season. It is galling for them, however, to score five goals across two games this week and come away with the sum total of one point. 

Where Villa always seem to fall the right side of the margins, United have a nasty habit of doing the opposite. 

It’s at this point the data tells us that United are probably doing the right thing in their tactical approach under Amorim, but they simply need to get better players within it. 

They remain unfathomably soft defensively, with Lenny Yoro today seemingly the only man in England not awake to Rogers’ awesome capacity when cutting in off his right foot. And in the absence of Amad, they lack thrust and incision at wing-back: it was fitting that Patrick Dorgu’s assist in this game was basically a tackle, as most of United attacks foundered at his feet. Manuel Ugarte is a disaster on the ball but he is at least well down the pecking order. More pertinently, Benjamin Sesko meanwhile came off having made almost zero impact yet again.

United will have the funds in January and next summer to upgrade at wing-back and in midfield, but their biggest present concern has to be the lack of return so far on the decision to push their chips in on Sesko. 

Cunha, however, had another bright game, while Mason Mount was again terrific. A good Mason Mount performance meets the US Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: it might be difficult to describe in front of other people, but you know it when you see it. 

Lisandro Martinez’ did an impressive turn in midfield having replaced the injured Bruno Fernandes, and so depleted was the squad that Amorim handed debuts to Jack Fletcher – the son of Darren, and a midfielder like his Dad – and Shea Lacey, who is basically a Phil Foden regen. (Both players are eligible to play for Ireland if they want, and while there’s little expectation of Fletcher declaring for Ireland, Lacey might be a slightly more likely bet, given his brother is now a pro boxer who wears a tricolour on his shorts.) 

But, of course, nobody really gives a toss about a table sorted according to xG differential.

Villa are in wonderland, while if United are without Fernandes and his unerring set-piece delivery for a few weeks, the forthcoming mood will be utterly at odds with the fact that this thing is finally getting better.