2002–03 Aston Villa F.C. season
season of football team
The 2002–03 English football season was Aston Villa's 11th season in the Premier League, and their 15th consecutive season in the top division of English football.
Fans had hoped that the return of successful former manager Graham Taylor would spark a serious challenge for honours once more, but the actual result was Villa's worst Premier League campaign in eight years, with the club in serious danger of relegation throughout the season. Survival was only achieved in the penultimate game of the season with a victory over already-doomed Sunderland; Taylor was soon on his way out of the club for good.
There were debuts for Ulises de la Cruz (89), Ronny Johnsen (49), Marcus Allbäck (35), Mark Kinsella (21), Øyvind Leonhardsen (19), Stefan Postma (13), Joey Guðjónsson (11), and Rob Edwards (8).
A season low was the 3–0 defeat by local rivals Birmingham City at St Andrews. A first-half goal from Clinton Morrison saw Birmingham in control at half time, before a comedy of errors saw a throw-in by Olof Mellberg roll under the foot of Villa goalkeeper Peter Enckelman and into the net to gift Blues a 2–0 lead. Geoff Horsfield added a third later in the game thanks to bad defending from Alpay Özalan. This game was followed by the visit to Villa Park. The game kicked into life when Villa striker Dion Dublin was sent off in the 51st minute for headbutting Robbie Savage. In the 74th minute, Australian Stan Lazaridis scored his first goal of the season, and three minutes later, a poor header back by Jlloyd Samuel allowed Horsfield to run onto the ball, beat Enckelman and score from close range.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2002–03 Aston Villa F.C. season” is season of football team. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Aston, Villa and season, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “2002–03 Aston Villa F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.