Aston Villa ease past Rotherham United to progress in Capital One Cup

Every cloud and all that. Having complained bitterly about being required to play their first three Premier League matches in a nine-day period, the fact Aston Villa do not therefore have to play this coming weekend enabled manager Paul Lambert to pick a far stronger team than has become customary for top division clubs at this stage of the Capital One. The result was the most straightforward of passages into the third round, in which they will face Spurs at home.

“I picked a team to win the game,” said Lambert, dryly, after seeing his side score three goals of outstanding quality, and keep their first clean sheet for 26 games.

Making only three changes to the 11 beaten by Liverpool last Saturday was also, perhaps, an indication that Lambert will not quickly get over his chagrin at being knocked out of the competition by Bradford City at the semi-final stage last season.

After winning promotion, Rotherham came into this game buoyed by a reassuringly solid start to life in League One, in which they have won one and drawn three of their first four fixtures. They brought 3,000 boisterous supporters to Villa Park, and they grew even noisier once their team began to create opportunities in the Villa penalty area. Alex Revell, on the six yard line, headed Ben Pringle’s corner a couple of feet wide and confidence grew.

It was unfortunate that just as they began to build some pressure Rotherham should have been the authors of their own downfall. Attempting to play a simple cross-field pass, the centre-half Kari Arnason scuffed the ball straight to Andreas Weimann. The Austrian bore down on the Rotherham penalty area, and though the ball rebounding back to him off a defender when he attempted to pick out Gabriel Agbonlahor was fortunate, there was nothing at all lucky about his superb angled shot into the far corner of Scott Shearer’s goal.

The lesson was not learned. Five minutes before the break, Agbonlahor caught Arnason in possession in the Rotherham half, made ground down the right and hung up a perfect cross for Christian Benteke to head just inside the far post.

Any hopes the Rotherham fans might have harboured of a comeback were extinguished a few minutes of the restart. A wonderful length of the field move involving at least 20 passes ended with Benteke lifting the ball into the penalty area for Fabian Delph, who had earlier picked up his usual unnecessary booking, to bring down and shoot past Shearer.

“Some of our football was excellent,” Lambert said. “All the goals were great, but the third, with the movement and the speed and the touches, was brilliant. There’s a different feeling to the squad this season and they’ve been excellent in all four games.”

Rotherham’s manager, Steve Evans, remained characteristically positive. “For 25 minutes we were by far the better side but we needed to go in front to make them nervous.”