Fifth placed nine games ago, a run of nine defeats leaves Villa free-falling in fifteenth as the team appear overwhelmed with nerves by their current predicament.

Joe Mercer's Villa lose nine successive games for the first time in the club’s history. Villa’s latest fixture is their eighth in twenty three days after their wildly interrupted season delivered the inevitable fixture list congestion in the final two months of the season. As a result, Villa make it twelve wins, seven draws and sixteen defeats in thirty five division one games so far this season as a campaign of such promise before the fixture interruption comes completely off the rails and sets a record for failure that no-one could or would have predicted.