Villa 4 - 2 City

• In the course of the season, losing Bozhinov rather than the three points will prove to be the most significant thing. Better teams than us will lose at Villa Park. But to lose potentially our best striker, minutes before kick off, is a real blow. It surely necessitates buying a new centre forward, therefore taking money away from plugging other gaps: in the middle and on the right of midfield.

• We didn't play that badly. Villa certainly should have been one or two up by half time, and Richards did well to hold them off until the 47th minute. But between Carew's goal and Agbonlahor's first we were really good. We were stronger and quicker than Villa, with fast counter-attacks driven by Petrov, Johnson and Etuhu. Before we went 2-1 down, the game was there for the taking.

• Hughes was right to put the defeat down to '10 minutes of madness'. It's true that we didn't defend well in the first half, but the three Agbonlahor goals were something else. The corner for the first was needlessly given away by Corluka, and then Agbonlahor was ignored by Fernandes. The otherwise impressive Richards and Ben Haim seemed to opt out of taking responsibility for him for his next two. Micah had a good game, but as captain ought to have been organizing the back line better. I'm not his biggest fan, but we really missed Dunne today.

• If there was one thing people said Hughes would do, it was revert to 4-4-2. So to see him bring out the old Eriksson era 4-4-1-1 was pretty funny. I thought it worked pretty well. Elano didn't really help out as much as I hoped (Reo-Coker was just too strong for him), but in flashes he linked play brilliantly. The system may have worked better with Bozhinov in as well - Evans isn't really suited to that role so did well to fill in.

• We've played much worse than this, and not just in the 8-1. If we can cut out the defensive mistakes, we'll have a good season.