Aston Villa boss Unai Emery was pleased with our performance and felt a 2-2 draw was a fair result against Liverpool.
The Premier League leaders took the lead at Villa Park after 30 minutes, as Mohamed Salah found the back of the net as the Reds pounced on a mistake from Andres Garcia.
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Villa though, to their credit, produced an excellent response to that setback, as goals from Youri Tielemans and Ollie Watkins turned things around in our favour ahead of half-time, as we went into the interval with a lead.
Unfortunately, our defensive frailties once again ensured that we weren’t able to see out the game and secure all three points, with Trent Alexander-Arnold’s deflected effort on the hour mark securing a share of the spoils for the visitors.
Nevertheless, Emery was keen to focus on the positives as we certainly put in a battling shift and had the chances to win the game, but ultimately the same could be said by Arne Slot as Liverpool were wasteful, and so a draw ultimately does feel like a fair result.
“Good evening. You have to wait your moment to attack and get chances like we had,” Emery is quoted as saying by BBC Sport. “We did. We were more or less competing well and we came back in the first half. When you are winning like that, it’s Liverpool and they can score like they did. We came close to scoring in the final minute. We had more options to win in the final 20 minutes.
“I see everything and I am trying to get the best. We are taking some risk and avoiding it a lot of the time. Today they scored but we are not changing and will work to improve.
“I think it is fair, the result for both teams. They had chances and we had chances to win but over 90 minutes, the balance in the moment we scored two goals but they always threatened in behind and scored two goals. We were competing very well but we are not happy with just one result like Liverpool. We want to beat them and try and improve and get better.
“They play good and are fantastic. It is another step forward. We tried to compete in our style and they played good.
“We are conceding more goals than normal and we have to correct it and work it. We want to win and when we are winning despite conceding goals it doesn’t matter but when we are not winning we have to concede less goals. We are working to improve every day.
“We compete very well with our style. We needed to deal with their threat when they were competing too. Today I think the result was fair and I think it was a good result after how we played.”
For Villa, it’s hopefully an important step in the right direction in terms of where our performance level needs to be at to compete at the top and get the desired results.
The approach, tempo and quality was there, but we were once again left to rue defensive vulnerabilities and lack of finishing in the second half as we were unable to secure all three points.
Nevertheless, with players hopefully returning from injury for our upcoming games, we’ll look to go from strength to strength in the coming weeks, and this has to be a performance and result that we can build on and get back to our best level having struggled in recent outings, particularly in the league.
While we’ll have crunch clashes in the Champions League and FA Cup too, we’re running out of games in the Premier League to try and secure a return to Europe’s top table for next season, and so Emery will hope that he’s pushing us in the right direction in the latter stages of the campaign.
