Joe Mercer's Villa lose seven successive games for the first time in the club’s history. Villa’s latest fixture is their sixth in eighteen days as their wildly interrupted season delivered the inevitable fixture list congestion in the final two months of the season. As a result, Villa make it twelve wins, seven draws and fourteen defeats in thirty three division one games so far this season as a campaign of such promise before the fixture interruption comes completely off the rails and sets a record for failure that no-one could or would have predicted.