When I saw Mings drive through to nip the ball away from Saka and get an accurate pass to the wing, straight away I felt that was great play on Mings's part. But Saka's reaction was typical of the player of the day, rolling over as though he'd been knocked over by a combined harvester. That was a feature of other Arsenal players, too.
The referee's reaction to award a free-kick and also give Mings a yellow card left me stunned. Pundits subsequently talked about the 'trailing leg' (of Mings) and how that justified the referee's decision. Some questioned whether it deserved a red.
Where else was Mings supposed to put his trailing leg? Was he supposed to wrap it up behind his back?
Saka subsequently complained about how he had been treated in the match and asked for more protection. He was talking of meeting the likes of Mings and Young. So, the Villa are now a lot of bully boys in the eyes of the Londoners are they?
That decision against Mings was so hard for me to comprehend, particularly having been brought up in the old school of football, when it was a hard game by comparison. A game made more so by heavy pitches and heavy footballs when it rained. But we enjoyed the game all the more, I feel, because the game was played from the heart, not by over-coached money-makers.
Yes, you had 'toughies' in the old game; players like Eddie Clamp (Wolves, in the 1950s), 'Chopper' Harris (Chelsea) and Giles, Bremner and Hunter of Leeds, players that would be at home in today's game. Perhaps Don Revie's policies laid the seeds of the modern game.
However, I must admit that having heard stories of Frank Barson and George Cummings, perhaps the Villa were not short of one or two 'hard nuts'!
But back in the 1950s and 1960s they were not typical: most players tried to play a fair game, and did. And football was the name of the game, not persistent niggly fouling that we see today in the cause of winning at all costs. The likes of Tom Finney and Stan Matthews would surely raise their eyebrows at today's game.
I have a report of a game at Arsenal in the early 1950s when Villa's Stan Lynn (who was regarded by some as a bit of a 'toughie') admitted that he deliberately pulled out of a tackle as he intuitively knew he might badly injure the opposition player, just as that player was about to score. He was not willing to take the risk of that injury. For Lynn to admit that, it is clear that football then was more about fair play rather than winning.
Anyone who saw Dave MacKay of Hearts and Spurs (and, nearly, Aston Villa!) - a tough-looking man but a born footballer - admired his play. So too George Young of Rangers.
Anyhow, concerning that Mings play earlier referred to, I still have etched in my memory a tackle made at Villa Park some seven or eight years ago by Keiran Clark (remember him?). He went full tilt into the tackle on someone to such an extent that I held my breath. But he went through completely cleanly and came out with the ball. It was a full-bloodied tackle that - if it had been mistimed - would have been judged as dangerous and he would have been carded. But based on the referee's reaction to Mings's tackle, Clark's fair tackle would also have been carded by that referee.
Contact sport has never been intended for whingers. In my opinion, those ballerinas of the pitch asking for protection should properly study what the game is about.
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