Few expected the 30-year-old to still be a Aston Villa player this season.
Gabby Agbonlahor may have accrued more cards than goals in the last five seasons but it’s a testament to his apparent change in character that he is even still a paid employee of Aston Villa football club.
The road to redemption is long and winding and Villa’s longest serving player still has some way to go to convince each and every fan that he warrants a second chance. Its nine months since he was stripped of the captaincy after being pictured partying the night away as his boyhood club slinked to relegation.
And the fact that his record since 2011/12 reads goals 21, cards 24, hardly helps. Yet, the 30-year-old frontman appears a different man since being brought back from the wilderness by Steve Bruce. It’s almost as if he knows and accepts that he is reaching the end of the glass of his final round in last-chance saloon.
Coming on at half-time in Villa’s 1-0 defeat to Cardiff, Agbonlahor was a lone bright spark in an otherwise lifeless performance.
To say he was back to his best would be an exaggeration but there were unmistakeable signs of Gabby at his peak; the direct running, the rapid pace, cutting inside at will to test the reflexes of home goalkeeper Brian Murphy.
“Gabby was excellent and yes, maybe I should have played him from the start,” Bruce lamented after the game, the Birmingham Mail reports. “He did more in five minutes than what [his team-mates] all did in the first half so fair play to him.”
Jonathan Kodjia’s AFCON enforced absence means Villa will be without their top scorer for the foreseeable future and, coupled with Ross McCormack’s ongoing ineffectiveness and Rudy Gestede’s imminent departure, Bruce is rather shorn of options up top.
Therefore, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Gabriel Agbonlahor is featuring from the off in the coming weeks.
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