The first domestic trophy of the season in England will be awarded on Sunday, when Aston Villa take on favourites Manchester City at Wembley Stadium in London in the League Cup final. The Citizens have already defeated Aston Villa twice this season in the Premier League, 3-0 in Birmingham and 6-1 at the Etihad Stadium. Manchester City have won the last four direct matches and have not suffered a defeat against Aston Villa since 2013.
Aston Villa have a chance of ending a trophy drought that spans across more than two decades, the last trophy that they won was in fact the League Cup back in 1996. They managed to reach the final again in 2010 but lost the match 2-1 against Manchester United. Now they had a very good run but were also quite lucky in the quarter-finals when they defeated a heavily weakened Liverpool side as the Premier League leaders were involved in the Club World Cup at the same time. In the semi-finals Aston Villa pulled off an upset by defeating Leicester 2-1 in the second leg, but since then they lost three consecutive games in the Premier League. Manager Dean Smith was quite upset with the performance of some of his players during last week's 2-0 defeat at Southampton and revealed that he will be making some changes for the big final. Jed Steer, Tom Heaton and Wesley are out injured.
Manchester City have won the last two editions of this competition and are looking forward to grabbing the trophy another time, which would take their total tally to seven League Cups in the club history. This week the Citizens played a great UEFA Champions League match at Real Madrid and won it 2-1, a very good result ahead of a second leg that will surely be extremely intense. That result extended their winning streak to three matches in all competitions, but Aymeric Laporte came off injured during the match and is expected to miss the final. Leroy Sane is also expected to miss out as he has not fully recovered from the severe knee ligaments injury that he suffered at the start of the season.
Probable line-ups:
Aston Villa: Nyland - Engels, Mings, Hause - Guilbert, Hourihane, Nakamba, Targett - El Ghazi, Samatta, Grealish
Manchester City: Bravo - Walker, Fernandinho, Garcia, Mendy - De Bruyne, Rodrigo, D. Silva - B. Silva, Aguero, Sterling
My prediction:
Aston Villa will surely fight bravely for their chance to win the trophy, but Manchester City are a lot better and will most likely win the match 3-1.
Here are the odds for the match at NetBet:
Aston Villa win - 20.00
Draw - 8.50
Man City win - 1.13