Villa 1 - 0 City

• It's not that losing is inherently upsetting, I don't think. The 3-0 defeat to Arsenal this year was one of our more proudly cohesive and cooperative performances for a while. The aggregate defeat to Hamburg towers over everything else we achieved under Mark Hughes. Et cetera. But to lose in precisely the same way to Aston Villa as we did five weeks ago to Everton, identical in pattern and narrative, that was a weekend-toxifier. And to do it all with Edin Džeko on the pitch just makes the pain of frustration worse.

• It started, like the Everton defeat, with a soft goal conceded. Kolo Touré mis-hit a pass, David Silva lost it, Ashley Young was allowed to shoot, Joe Hart could only palm it away and Darren Bent finished. He has inflicted 1-0 defeats on City with Charlton and Sunderland before: it should not be a surprise any more. Nor should we be by the fact that while City are excellent when in lead we are fairly helpless in games in which we go behind.

• The remainder of the game was loyal to the script. We dominated possession, while Villa were happy to defend deep and narrow. They prevented us from passing through them, which, with David Silva, Yaya Touré and Carlos Tévez in the side, would always be the inclination. We tried and tried to find a gap in the fence but we just could not. To be fair, Villa defended well as a team, and James Collins and Richard Dunne were both excellent individually. So our failure to pick through them should not itself be surprising, or, for that matter, frustrating.

• What is frustrating, though, is our failure to anything differently. We were set up to provide an alternative aerial threat. Džeko was signed with the explicit purpose of giving us a Plan B in attack for precisely this sort of situation. He relies, of course, on service from wide areas, but even with both new eight-figure sum full-backs on the pitch not enough crosses reached him. Aleksandar Kolarov was our best attacking player in the first half, but faded, while Boateng looked too casual throughout. Adam Johnson came on and brought some extra width, but not enough, and James Milner stayed on the bench. For all our possession the best chances we had were shots from distance and one header wide from the new boy.

• Of course, if we had not conceded the early goal it would have been a different game: Villa would not have parked the bus and we might have opened them up a bit more. Defensive errors, worryingly frequent in 2011, certainly need to be eliminated. But the failure to create chances and score goals against teams that defend in numbers is the limiting factor this year. It will improve, as new players acclimatise. But for now it's still infuriating.