At what point do uncharacteristic performances from Aston Villa become an alarming trend?
Aston Villa’s supporters were left to ponder this question on Wednesday evening.
Optimism had been high on the Eurostar in the morning and towards the city centre in the afternoon. Yet, by the evening, the good cheer had fallen flat. If last week carried caveats, the 1-0 defeat against Club Brugge was inescapably bad. Potentially the nadir of Unai Emery’s tenure so far.
The Athletic assesses the reasons behind Villa’s troubling performance…
The “completely strange” penalty
Tyrone Mings’ handball was the game’s decisive moment and Emery, speaking in his post-match press conference, apportioned a chunk of the blame onto the incident.
“It’s completely strange,” he said. “It is the biggest mistake we’ve made in my career as a coach. If we make a mistake in our build-up, I can accept it. In the first half, we did it fantastic.”
“Fantastic” was a surprising choice of words, given Villa had been engulfed in a malaise for long periods. Although Mings’ brain fog clouded the overall performance in the immediate aftermath, it would be unfair to use the episode as the determining factor. Still, the bizarre sequence of events was indicative of Villa’s miserable night.
Emery’s central defenders often take goal kicks and Mings, for whatever reason, thought he would take the next, despite Emiliano Martinez already passing in front of him. Mings stepped out of the six-yard box and scooped up the ball with one hand.
If Villa and Mings were hoping for gentle understanding from German referee Tobias Stieler, they should have known better. The official had already proven a stickler for the rules, having booked Mings and Diego Carlos in one fell swoop, the latter for backchat.
(Kurt Desplenter/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)
A shapeless structure
John McGinn tends to serve as Villa’s bellwether. At his best, he drives his team upfield. When toiling — and McGinn is the first to admit — he struggles with his quality on the ball and in tight spaces.
The captain’s recent form has been held in mitigation. He has played as an archetypal winger which is not conducive to his natural strengths. Emery acknowledged this on Wednesday, with Villa’s warm-up consisting of unpressurised patterns of play, whereby the two wide players in possession — Leon Bailey and Ian Maatsen— delivered balls into the box while the central attackers combined. Interestingly, McGinn was deployed as the second forward behind Ollie Watkins while Morgan Rogers, who tends to play in the position, was shifted to the left.
This served as a premonition of Villa’s first-half setup, with Rogers on the left and McGinn struggling to find space centrally. The experiment was short-lived as Rogers and McGinn switched roles after the break, in some ways characterising Villa’s best-laid plans being quickly outgunned.
Brugge deployed a back three in possession with high wing-backs and had constant success by passing wide and around Villa’s narrow shape. In the first half, Brugge hit the post and Mings had to clear another off the line.
Villa looked muddled even after making changes, with Jhon Duran again partnering Watkins up front and both making the same movement towards the ball and occupying the same spaces.
An absence of energy leads to a flailing press
Villa could not work out how to press Brugge — who have made the second-most progressive passes in the Belgian League and are consequently not known for their build-up play — having two forwards pressing three defenders (the left-back had tucked in). This always left a spare Brugge defender and Villa could not get close to the ball or get to grips with the overload the hosts invariably had.
Even when Brugge returned to a back four from goal kicks and instead had two central defenders, they retained a numerical advantage. Watkins was left to press both while McGinn marked the closest midfielder. Here, a four-versus-two transpires due to Villa’s wide players being pinned deep by Brugge’s full-backs.
Damningly, it was not until the 82nd minute that Villa managed a cohesive press, resulting in Brugge kicking the ball out of play. For a side usually drilled to precision, the confusion of who and when to press was concerning.
Tactical aberrations paled into insignificance by the end, though, with lethargy spreading. Brugge supporters jeered and mocked Villa’s players when they dived in for challenges and yet were so far away from the ball they would be danced around. Warning signs were ominous early on when Morgan Rogers pointed at Youri Tielemans, asking why the midfielder was not marking his player from a throw-in.
A key metric of Emery is “duels” and no player came out on top of their match-up. Brugge made three times the number of interceptions and twice the amount of clearances. Villa made four tackles in the attacking half, with none in the attacking third and Brugge, typically direct in style, grew in confidence when playing from deep.
Possession without purpose
Ball retention and passing metrics belie how ineffective Villa were. In the first half, they had upwards of 65 per cent possession but created little of substance, aside from registering their only shot on target.
Players’ friends and families were joined by Villa’s under-18s side, who had played against Brugge earlier in the afternoon. They sat high and to the right of Emery’s technical area.
“No-one is coming to get the ball,” remarked one observer nearby. Struggling to break down a compact block is nothing new considering Emery said it was the team’s “next step” last season.
The problem had never been as glaring as it was in Belgium. There was a proliferation of misplaced passes and an absence of movement in forward areas, with Brugge allowing Diego Carlos to have the ball unmarked. He touched the ball 92 times and, despite coming off with 15 minutes left, made 31 more passes than any Brugge player and a dozen more than any team-mate. Only a handful, though, were incisive.
All the while Emery walked furiously and constantly across his technical area. He was agitated and unsure of why his often cerebral structure and personnel had come up so short.
(Header photo: Nicolas Tucat / AFP via Getty Images)
