Some wins are a little bit lucky and others downright fluky or simply ground out, but this Aston Villa victory belonged to a different category.
It was the sort of triumph that can be filed under “thoroughly deserved”. Indeed, much of Villa’s attacking play was so fluid, fluent and gloriously improvisational that, by comparison, Newcastle looked as if they were engaged in a footballing equivalent of painting by numbers.
Howe employs so many analysts these days that there is a suspicion his team have become a little too formulaic, a bit over data-driven. Here though the off-the-cuff brilliance of Morgan Rogers and Emiliano Buendía, in particular, made the difference on a day when consistently intelligent defending from Unai Emery’s team, not to mention some impressive goalkeeping on Emiliano Martínez’s part, always made big differences.
Granted, Newcastle might have taken an early lead had Martínez, making his 200th Premier League appearance for Villa, not done extremely well to deny Sandro Tonali. Nick Pope, though, was soon performing similar wonders to divert an Ollie Watkins shot away for a corner following Jadon Sancho’s fine through pass.
And even Pope had no answer to Buendía’s swerving, dipping and stunning opening goal dispatched from the edge of the area.
