WANTED: A new Peter McParland. Apply, c/o Gerard Houllier, AVFC, Villa Park, B6. Closing date: Yet another year.

(Warning – might have to settle for a place on the bench in important FA Cup games).

Villa’s wait for FA Cup glory will continue into a 55th season with McParland’s place in claret and blue folklore still unchallenged since 1957. That’s nineteen fifty seven.

Even more annoyingly is the sense that Villa’s latest ill-fated FA Cup crusade seemed doom to fail before the last-16 tie even kicked off. There’s no escaping the fact that Gerard Houllier’s gratuitous rotation sent Villa spinning out of the only competition they could still win.

With the pre-match build up dominated by wage bill figures revealing the excessive waste of the Martin O’Neill era, Villa’s travelling fans were questioning whether they themselves had wasted £22.50 of their hard-earned cash on tickets and goodness knows how much on travel programmes and pies. They had.

Houllier described the 4-0 Premier League drubbing at Eastlands in late December as “the low point of my career”. Yet rather than exorcise the demons, he chose to exercise the reserves. There were shades of CSKA Moscow in Houllier’s shock team selection with the manager wrongly trusting his understudies to steer the claret and blues into the latter stages. Even stranger was that this time this tournament represented Villa’s only chance of success.

More to the point, Waiting for them, just 90 minutes from Wembley, was as-close-as-damn-it a home banker against last season’s last eight opponents Reading. No disrespect to the Royals.

Houllier made eight changes from the weekend win over Blackburn, resting Ashley Young, Stewart Downing, Marc Albrighton, Nigel Reo-Coker, Kyle Walker and Robert Pires, along with cup-tied Darren Bent and injured Nathan Baker.

In their places came makeshift left-back Fabian Delph, full debutants Michael Bradley and Chris Herd, Nathan Delfouneso, Gabby Agbonlahor, Stiliyan Petrov, Barry Bannan and Emile Heskey.

Some of them might have been untried, but they were certainly soon tested.

Corners are becoming more like white-flag kicks Villa given how they surrender from setpieces. Once again it was dead easy from a dead ball.