Aston Villa’s manager, Unai Emery, is at an interesting crossroads. His team are getting ready to visit Crystal Palace this Sunday. This match is enormously important to Villa. They just haven’t been able to find a way to defeat Oliver Glasner’s team, with four defeats and a draw from the last five meetings. With the club’s recent performance over the past few years under a microscope, Emery is very much concerned with tactical improvements, not financial constraints.
Emery’s no slouch, of course—he has a pretty good recent track record, having lifted trophies in four different years while managing at three different clubs. The task ahead of him at Aston Villa is a tall order. Today the team sits in 84th place among the 92 professional clubs in the English football league system. It’s been a long drought, too. They haven’t won any silverware since 1996. The worry for supporters is a sense of frustration after a decade long club trophy drought. It’s even more frustrating for Villa, given they were the only Premier League side last season to average 40,000-plus a game without lifting silverware since 2020.
Aston Villa controlled possession today against Brentford, possessing the ball 76 percent of the time. They failed to turn that dominance into goals. All of this has led to some serious soul-searching about how good or bad their offensive play-calls are. In his programme notes ahead of the upcoming match against Newcastle, Emery posed a critical question: “Be better in 90 minutes, be better than Aston Villa were last year.” His commitment to getting the best possible team is highly apparent just by the way he keeps repeating that they need to do better.
Emery doesn’t disagree with the narrative that prior to his hiring, Aston Villa was in the depths of hell, including flirting with relegation to the Championship. He stated, “Before we arrived, they were struggling, they were even in the Championship.” Even Elliott acknowledges he’s done a terrible job up until now assembling a competitive team. Second, is his faith in the potential of his players, and the direction in which they are heading.
While the manager’s tactical approach is certainly encouraging, perhaps even more so is his reportedly strong desire to use academy players in the first team. At the same time, he’s looking for different solutions to ensure the squad remains competitive. The recent signing of Evann Guessand from Nice should help Villa deep forward. Emery remarked that Guessand “is going to help Aston Villa in the attacking third,” highlighting his optimism about the new signing’s impact.
Injuries have begun to plague the team. Amadou Onana will join Boubacar Kamara on the sidelines for the trip to Crystal Palace now. These recent hurdles represent another complication to Emery’s master plans as he steers through this stormy period.
The pressure on Emery has been immense. Supporters are rightly angry, particularly after a summer of no-spend and the sale of Jacob Ramsey, a homegrown rising-star talent through their academy, to Newcastle. Supporters are understandably upset. They’re looking at other competing teams making big investments and then turning around and looking at their own team who is still bad because they haven’t invested.
In response to the challenges ahead, Emery stated, “My response is to try to work. To work, to work, to work.” His steely resolve is on full display as he’s intent on making sure Villa’s turn around their fortunes. He encapsulated his philosophy with a sentiment that resonates with both players and supporters alike: “We have our own way and we are happy.”
As Aston Villa prepare for their Premier League opener against Crystal Palace, Unai Emery has been looking back on previous meetings with the Eagles. He recalls their last meeting, stating, “And of course, the players, they know it. I know it. The supporters, as well, they know Crystal Palace, the last match that we played against them.” That immediacy to their competitors might just be the necessary fuel the team would need to flip their fates.
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