Aston Villa boss Unai Emery has provided our latest team news ahead of our Premier League encounter with Fulham on Sunday.
Although Villa bounced back in midweek with a win over AZ Alkmaar in the Europa Conference League, Emery will be looking for a response from his players following the disappointment of losing at Nottingham Forest last weekend.
READ MORE: Five key talking points as Villa come from behind to secure AZ Alkmaar win
While the international break will follow this game, it has been a busy week with three games in seven days, and so it remains to be seen if the Villa boss is set to make any changes to keep his squad fresh.
In order to do that though without allowing our level to drop, he would have been hoping for positive news on the injury front this week, and that is largely the case, albeit we may well have one new absentee.
After scoring his first goal for the club in the win over AZ, Diego Carlos limped off in the latter stages on Thursday night, and it sounds as though the Brazilian centre-half will miss out this weekend along with Jacob Ramsey.
However, Emery reiterated that Alex Moreno is ready to play now and so he could feature, while there’s a clean bill of health for the rest of the squad.
“Diego Carlos, I don’t know exactly, he’s not going to be available for Sunday. Maybe it’s a small injury, maybe, but it’ll be difficult to be available for Sunday,” he told the media, as per VillaTV.
“Jacob Ramsey is progressing very well, he’s close to being with us in training sessions every day. But not yet.
“And Álex Moreno is progressing very good, he’s available to be in the squad and he’s available to be ready to play Sunday.
“Other players, they are available and ready to play.”
It’s a tough test for us despite Fulham dropping down to 15th place in the standings currently, and so we’ll have to be at our best to get the job done and potentially move into the top four with a win.
Complacency certainly shouldn’t be an issue given the reminder we were given by Forest last weekend in terms of what happens when we don’t play to our standard, and so we’ll hopefully sign off with three points before the break to continue what has been a largely positive start to the campaign.