This article is part of Football FanCast’s In Numbers series, which takes a statistical look at performances, season-long form and reported transfer targets…
Aston Villa picked up just their second win of this current Premier League season with a ruthless performance against Norwich City at Carrow Road on Saturday.
It means Dean Smith’s side rise out of the bottom three into 15th after the conclusion of the weekend’s fixtures.
The west Midlands club were in rampant form as they stuck five past the injury-plagued Canaries.
Club-record summer signing Wesley notched a brace in the first half, which could have easily been a hat-trick after seeing his penalty saved – doubling his tally to four for the season.
Captain Jack Grealish and fellow midfielders Conor Hourihane and Douglas Luiz added to Daniel Farke’s misery before Josip Drmic tucked home a meaningless consolation goal inside the final three minutes.
Despite all of the positives involved in such an emphatic display, one Villa man put in a subdued showing, which perhaps may come as a surprise to some.
Tyrone Mings has drawn many of the early season plaudits, having formed what appeared to be a resolute partnership with Bjorn Engels as the pair have managed two clean sheets.
It also resulted in him gaining back-to-back England call ups in the past two months.
Though in recent times, they have struggled to stop the ball going into the net as Villa have conceded six goals in their last three matches, and Saturday epitomised that entirely.
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Villa looked dead certain to end the game with a clean sheet to add a healthy five goals to their goal difference until a moment of madness from Mings put paid to any hopes of that.
The 26-year-old looped a rather lackadaisical ball back towards Tom Heaton, only for Drmic to nip in and slot an easy strike into the open net – resulting in one error leading to a goal, per SofaScore.
Over the course of the 90 minutes, the 6 foot 5 colossus failed to register a single tackle, which may be expected with Villa romping to victory, but the home side recorded more possession at 57% – meaning they were in the match more than the scoreline suggests.
He also struggled to regularly find a claret and blue shirt with a passing accuracy of just 59%.
Mings is quite lucky that Norwich failed to punish more than the one mistake as he lost possession 11 times.
It appears amongst all the early season hype surrounding the centre-back, the fact that he has barely featured in the top-flight was seemingly forgotten.
In a four-year spell with Bournemouth in the Premier League, Mings made just 17 appearances, per Transfermarkt.
Let’s just not get carried away as moments such as this can happen, especially when a player hasn’t been exposed enough to the perils of the elite game.