While there was much to like about Aston Villa’s win over Fulham, our strength in depth was undoubtedly on show this weekend.
Our horrible injury luck has continued to limit us so far this season, with various key individuals spending time on the sidelines through the early stages of the campaign.
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Similarly to last season though, that hasn’t impacted our performances and results as we’ve made a positive start across the Premier League, Champions League and Carabao Cup, and so Unai Emery and his players deserve plenty of credit for dealing with that adversity.
Reinforcements are on their way though to strengthen our ability to compete at the top level on multiple fronts, as we displayed our strength in depth at Craven Cottage given the names on the sidelines.
Jaden Philogene, Ross Barkley, Jhon Duran, John McGinn and Emiliano Buendia were all introduced off the bench, while Ezri Konsa, Ian Maatsen and Boubacar Kamara were unused substitutes.
Coupled with Tyrone Mings being on the verge of returning from injury, we’re now so close to having a full-strength squad at Emery’s disposal.
“We’ve got a squad to do that, we’ve got players coming back from injury, we’ve got a big squad who are going to be needed,” Morgan Rogers told VillaTV. “You can see that today it’s bigger, everyone’s come back, we’re all united as a team, we all want the same goal.”
It’s hard to remember the last time we had such a strong group and had the luxury of bringing on such quality from the bench in such numbers, but it’s going to be a fundamental factor in how successful we can be this season.
Aside from the obvious benefit of allowing Emery to rotate and rest players to avoid burn-out and injuries, it gives the Villa boss different tactical solutions to help us adapt and evolve to put together a winning gameplan depending on the opposition.
Further, while we’ll see Leon Bailey return to form before long as he currently goes through a struggle, it’s important that we have other options to come in and replace him as he encounters that process to ensure that we don’t suffer from a major drop-off.
As we’ve seen from Duran too so far this season, we have players capable of coming on and making a decisive impact when things perhaps don’t go to plan with our starting XI, and this will be a critical factor in how far we can go this year.
“We have a lot of players that can come on and score,” Ollie Watkins noted, as per BirminghamLive. “It is good competition and it keeps you on your toes. It is only getting better for us and we see the direction the club is going in. It’s exciting times being a Villa player.”
The hope now is of course that we can avoid further injury setbacks and keep everyone fit now we have them back, and as we sit in fourth place in the Premier League table after eight games having made our best start to a league season in 26 years, we’ll need everyone to play their part to maintain our consistency and improvement.