After suffering a damaging defeat at Manchester City in midweek, Aston Villa must bounce back quickly but Unai Emery has to find a fix for a key issue.
While our focus will quickly switch to our FA Cup semi-final against Crystal Palace this weekend, the task ahead is now clear. Villa will hopefully have six more games to play this season, and each one is now a must-win scenario.
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Depending on Premier League results this weekend, we may find ourselves further off the pace and having more ground to make up on our rivals in the battle for Champions League qualification, but the handbrake is now most certainly off in our remaining four outings, as we can’t play a containment job or conserve energy, we’ll have to go for it in every outing and look to win.
That’s not to say that Emery won’t devise specific and tailored game-plans to get the desired outcome, but there’s no more room for error for Villa if we are to achieve our remaining objectives, and there is still confidence and belief that we can at least do our job, and hope that things play out elsewhere in our favour.
What the Villa boss must do now though is find a fix to an issue that has proven costly in two huge games against Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City over the past month, and that’s finding an alternative solution at right-back when Matty Cash is not on the pitch.
While it’s worth noting that we’re not perfect when he is playing, on two pivotal occasions where Axel Disasi has come on to play at right-back in the latter stages of a game, we’ve now conceded two major goals away at PSG in the first leg of our Champions League quarter-final tie, and now against City deep into injury time in our crunch league showdown, with both goals created down our right side.
It’s an issue that has cropped up previously when Ezri Konsa was asked to play at right-back, and while the players in question are versatile and capable of playing in that position, the evidence speaks for itself now in that it is costing us in big games, and the entire backline has to take responsibility for that too.
Whether it’s moving John McGinn over to the right side to help out and provide cover for Disasi or looking to Andres Garcia to step up and deliver, as he has done when featuring this season, Villa were already looking vulnerable on that side of the pitch against City as we were constantly caught out with the long ball switch of play and it certainly didn’t get better after the change.
Emery has been excellent with his rotation and changes in recent weeks, but to put Disasi up against Jeremy Doku has to be seen as an error in judgement, and again, Konsa, Pau Torres and Lucas Digne were all culpable for what followed before Matheus Nunes applied the finish at the back post.
With at least five, but hopefully six, more games to go, Cash will hopefully be available for all of them as he’s our most experienced and natural option in that role, and while Disasi has played well there for us at times since arriving in January, we can’t afford a third scenario where it proves to be a damaging decision with so much still on the line.
