Aston Villa don't fear big money clubs, says Zat Knight

Sep 12 2008 By Nick Davis

ZAT Knight believes Villa should not fear being overtaken by moneybags Manchester City, insisting: “It’s all well and good having the money but can they click as a team?”

Arab company Abu Dhabi United Group bought a majority stake in City last week, making them one of the richest clubs in the world.

Mark Hughes immediately snapped-up Brazilian superstar Robinho for £32.5million and the former Wales boss is sure to splash the cash again in January.

That makes City serious contenders for a top-four spot – also a target for Knight and his Villa team mates.

The central defender said: “We believe that we can break into that top four. We want to do better than last season finishing sixth, obviously doing that is fifth or fourth...or third or second!

“Man City’s goal will be the same and obviously they’ve got the money to do it now. The window is shut so they have to play with what they’ve got for the next four or five months.

“There’ll be a lot of ups and downs; they’ll need to keep people fit so we’ll just see how it goes. We just need to concentrate on ourselves as we already have a good squad of players here.

“It’s all well and good having the money but can they click as a team?”

Knight, who has vowed to fight for a return to the Villa starting line-up, added: “We have brought in some quality players. These are very exciting times for us.

“We just about scraped through with the players we had last season, we were very lucky to not have any injuries, I think the only one was Curtis and that was at the end of last season.

“I think we have a lot of strength in depth now but we are going to need it because we have a lot of games coming up.

“Last season we got knocked out of the cups quite early, we just had the league to concentrate on so we didn’t really have that many games.

“Now I think we’ll have two every week so we need to keep people fit, on form and ticking over.”