Funny lot the Villa fans, but always have been. Villa Park's jammed full when they're doing well but their "crowds" used to dip alarmingly when they weren't.
The record books show that just 14,215 hardly souls turned up to Villa Park on New Year's Day 1986 for a First Division game that City won 1-0. A winter's day admittedly but a public holiday all the same and in a city with a population roughly twice that of Manchester. We never went that low in the top flight! In the return game at Maine Road the crowd was almost 50% bigger, at 20,935 (note for younger readers: not many clubs got huge crowds in the troublesome 1980s).
Despite their staples such as "Where were you when you were shit?" and for all the jumping up and down they do about winning the European Cup (as impressive as that famous 1982 win was) there were plenty of times when they could barely fill HALF their ground in the same decade!
It got a bit testy last night at Wembley Stadium Station, with insults zinging from side to side in equal measure. Fair enough, but their beef seemed to run along now-familiar lines: plastic fans, no history, bought success etc. Even the Birmingham Mail is reporting that we had more fans at Wembley yesterday than they did, although a small amount of expensive Club Wembley tickets went unsold:
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sp...ws/carabao-cup-final-attendance-fans-17843062
I would never deny Aston Villa their history - it's as good as anyone else's and better than most. What football fan would? So why would they, of all people, seek to deny us ours?
* And have you ever noticed how few Brummies ever go out of Birmingham? You rarely come across them on holiday or anywhere else for that matter!