Aston Villa are currently enjoying the extreme humidity in Hong Kong right now as they get set to battle for the Barclays Asia Trophy beginning on Wednesday. Finding an official schedule was significantly harder than you would expect. The official website for the tournament seems to be its Facebook page. I understand the desire to connect everything to some sort of social network, but it feels almost as if the premier league went out of its way to make this site hard to find. (But the site has good news for those of you who are still upset about the Alex McLeish signing. Apparently, Gerard Houllier is still our manager. He is even one of our players to watch, though I doubt his doctors would like him doing that to his heart. I guess we'll have to rely on Stewart Downing instead. I mean, really. It's as if the Premier League didn't even try.)
Regardless, the boys in claret and blue will be taking on Blackburn Rovers at 1100 BST (6 AM Eastern, 3 AM Pacfic) on Wednesday. I hear that FSC will have a replay at some point, but since it is FSC, I put no stock whatsoever into the reliability of that. Win or lose, Aston Villa will then play a second game on Saturday. If things went well on Wednesday, they will most likely face Chelsea for the trophy at 1330 BST (you do the math). If things have gone poorly, Darren Bent and company will probably get Hong Kong-based side Kitchee SC in the 3rd/4th place match at 1100 BST.
And all of this serves as a rather lengthy excuse to bring you important news. You see, here in Washington, DC, we have MARC trains that can take you from DC to Baltimore. In Hong Kong, they apparently have Marc trains which can take you on a magical journey from the stadium to the nearest LEGO store.
(Note: since Kirsten already wrote about the Charles N'Zogbia story, and since there really isn't any other noteworthy news, there will be no link post today.