By Ryan Ghee
August 12 2005

Aston Villa completed their pre-season preparations with an impressive victory against Dutch side FC Utrecht. It was Aston Villa who started the match strongest with Solano forcing a save within 4 minutes and Barry dragging his shot wide of the goal two minutes later. On the 10 minute mark, Juan Pablo Angel gave Villa the lead as he powered a header past Cornelisse after good work from Aaron Hughes.
It took 17 minutes for the hosts to create their first chance of the match as Laursen was called upon to block Douglas' goal-bound header.
At the other end Kevin Phillips released Angel who went down under a heavy challenge in the box only for the referee to wave play on.
Chances were few and far between for the next twenty minutes of the match as Villa seemed content to play possession football.
Utrecht had the better of the closing stages of the half as Fortune saw his header rattle the post on 37 minutes. Three minutes later it was Fortune again who had a free header on goal and this time he found the net to put Utrecht on level terms going into half time.
At the start of the second half Kevin Phillips thought he had restored Villa's lead only for his header to be ruled out after the ref spotted a push.
This seemed to dampen Villa's spirits as they allowed Utrecht to take control of the match. After five second half minutes, Nelisse headed just wide of the Villa goal and five minutes later the same player forced a great save out of Thomas Sorensen.
Going into the closing stages it was end-to-end football as Angel came close after 85 minutes and seconds later Utrecht's Rossini clipped the bar with a speculative 35-yard effort.
With only two minutes of the match remaining, Kevin Phillips latched onto Rossini's poor back-pass and he cooly slotted the ball home to give Villa the lead.
Villa defended well for the final few minutes and managed to hold on to a hard-fought 2-1 win.

Speaking after the match, David O'Leary said, "First of all it was a good game for us.I thought we started off really well and then sat back and invited a little bit of pressure. We gave a bit of a silly goal away but that's something we can brush up on...Now we'll look to work them hard in the last week of pre-season and hopefully they should be ready for the Bolton game."