Everton 1-1 Aston Villa match report: The Daily Mirror verdict

If a year in politics is a lifetime, then in football, it is a career span.

This time 12 months ago, Ashley Young scored two goals at Goodison so good that his manager eulogised "world class finishing from a player who has a world class talent".

That talent was enough to catapult the Aston Villa winger into the England squad, win him the PFA Young Player of the Year award, and inspire suggestions that he could establish himself in the national side for the next decade and beyond.

Cut to a season later, and Young was an anonymous figure at Everton, in what has been a largely anonymous campaign so far, culminating in his absence from the last England squad, as Fabio Capello looked elsewhere for youthful promise.

So what has happened to him? The one-time youth football team-mate of F1 driver Lewis Hamilton, Young seems to have suffered a similar fate this season to his old friend, slipping down the rankings into the misery of being parked in the garage.

Yet according to his boss Martin O'Neill, it is not mechanical failure that is now hampering his flying winger, but merely the extra attention of his elevated status that has merely slowed him temporarily. Like Hamilton, the Villa manager believes his flying charge still retains world champion ability.

"People may be asking questions about him now, but Young was world class here last season, and I'm still delighted with the way he is performing, and the way he is progressing," O'Neill explained.

"He is having to contend with different things now. He is being double covered and sometimes treble, and it is as much up to us as him to work out how to counter that.

"We ask an awful lot of him you know, perhaps too much, because we ask him to work incredibly hard in defence and get back all the time, but then to fly forward and create a lot of excitement in attack. It's tough for him, but we feel he is doing it right and we are still delighted with him."

Young didn't contribute much in what was a tense, at times dour affair, with Everton searching for the points to move swiftly away from their unexpected position near the bottom of the table, while Villa look, perhaps rather anxiously, above them to the Champions League places.

But there were still flashes of the pace and excitement that made him such a contender last season, and O'Neill is confident that the man he signed from Watford will soon come good again to stake a claim to a place in England's World Cup squad.

"At the moment he seems to be out of the England picture, but I don't think he's overly worried about that at this point in his development, because he's still got time and overall he's still making progress," the Villa boss said.

"He has something that few players in his position have - the ability to take defenders on and go past people. It is a rare talent, and he has not lost that ability.

"I'm a boring twit and I watch a lot of football. I'll watch Barcelona on the TV if I want to watch some mesmerising football, I'll watch the finesse of Arsenal and the power of Manchester United and Chelsea, and I'll even switch over to watch the Bolivian League.

"And in watching all of that, I hardly ever see players who want to beat a man. It's a dying art in modern football, there are maybe four or five players in the whole of Europe who can pick up the ball and go past people, but Ashley can still do that.

"He still wants to be creative, and I tell you, he'll go again, there is no doubt about that."

It wasn't Young who proved creative for Villa but once again their go-to man John Carew, who equalised with his first touch of the game after coming on as a half-time substitute for the injured James Milner.

Given his record against Everton the only surprise was that he didn't start the game, and it is no surprise at all that Emile Heskey apparently wants to look elsewhere for a regular start to protect his England place, because he is a long way behind the Norwegian striker.

If Carew's impressive second half display put Heskey's limp efforts into context, and deserved a goal, then it was cruel luck on home keeper Tim Howard, who brilliantly saved Gabriel Agbonlahor's shot 45 seconds after the break, only to see his defence dissolve when dealing with the rebound.

It was tough luck on Everton, too, because they deserved a win for the spirit they showed in the face of an injury crisis so severe that it would have destroyed other clubs.

They took a lead on the stroke of half-time when the impressive Diniyar Bilyaletdinov stroked home after the ball bounced kindly off Yakubu and James Collins.

But that fortune did not last as the Russian winger was shown a straight red card, which means he will miss three matches - an absence Everton's threadbare squad simply can not accommodate.

It was a ridiculous decision from referee Lee Probert who had an awful afternoon, typified by the yellow card he showed to Stephen Warnock when it was Stiliyan Petrov who committed the foul.

Bilyaletdinov slipped while challenging and it was the momentum of losing his footing that took him into Petrov and made the tackle look far worse than it actually was.

Probert also dismissed Carlos Cuellar for two yellow cards, when the tackles that prompted them warranted no such action, and in fact were not fouls at all, which brings the official's competence into question.

It will leave Everton with an even greater selection headache, and manager David Moyes wondering if his side can survive the current crisis without terminal damage to their hopes of a top six finish.

"When you look at the players we have got out, then the positive side is that when they are all fit, we should have a very, very strong team, and actually quite a few decisions," he explained.

"But the situation we are in, there is a danger that if we drop too many points at this stage we won't be able to catch up later on in the season.

"I'm hoping the tightness of the Premier League means we aren't a million miles away. We know we're not at the standard that we want, but we aren't a million miles away. Of course we have to do better, that is the answer - we have to start winning games.

Everton: Howard 7; Neill 6, Yobo 7, Distin 6, Baines 7; Heitinga 5, Rodwell 6; Cahill 6, Fellaini 5 (Saha 72, 5), Bilyaletdinov 7; Yakubu 5 (Jo 90).

Aston Villa: Friedel 7; Cuellar 5, Collins 6, Dunne 7, Warnock 7; Sidwell 6, Petrov 7; Young 6, Heskey 5, Milner 5; Agbonlahor 6.