THE Villa Park grass would have grown around four-thousandths of an inch during Saturday’s derby encounter.

But try as you might, even with eyes fixed firmly on the turf for an hour-and-a-half, you would not have seen it sprout upwards.

Not with the naked eye.

The irony was that such a lush lawn was tailor-made for highly-paid sportsmen to excel.

But it was wasted on them. Lawns like this deserve a flower bed, a row of petunias, or daffodils perhaps?

Something rather more pleasing on the eye than two football teams seemingly intent on boring each other to death.

The game started well enough, but then didn’t go anywhere.

Like a bloke who decides to take up hiking for a hobby. He kits himself out with the latest footwear, flashlight, rain jacket, flask of hot soup, map and compass only to then settle down in front of the telly to watch a DVD of Greatest Walks Along Hadrian’s Wall.

Speaking of the television, the missing 10,000 were perhaps the lucky ones. Sat at home in their deep armchairs they would have been able to switch to Mike Cattermole and Lesley Graham presenting the racing at Goodwood.

The missing 1,100 Wolves fans, out of the 2,650 allocation, would have been safe in the knowledge that they had saved £43 into the bargain, too.

Great swathes of empty seats, all over the place. And this was not Charlton at home on a Wednesday night in 1999, or David O’Leary’s miserable misfits at home to Southampton on a cold and blowy Tuesday. This was a local derby.

In some ways it was like the 1980s again. A similar-sized crowd had watched Wolves win here on a Monday night in March 1980, although inside the ground this weekend the shorts were mercifully baggier and outside there were rather fewer Ford Cortinas.

There would have been plenty more goal-mouth action for Emlyn Hughes and Allan Evans to thwart that night 31 years ago.

Leave your seat early at half-time then, and you would have missed a shot or two.

Should anyone have left with five minutes remaining of the first half on Saturday, to perhaps queue for a £3.80 pint of cold Fosters, they would have missed Jamie O’Hara kicking Stiliyan Petrov and Richard Dunne doing the unusual job of a play-maker in almost threading a forward through the eye of a needle – almost.

And yet all the ingredients were there for a feisty old tussle: two unbeaten teams wallowing in self-confidence and both managers picking four attacking players apiece with just the one ‘holding’ midfielder, Karl Henry, on view.