Aston Villa face Club Brugge in the first leg of our Champions League round-of-16 tie on Tuesday evening, and Unai Emery has named his starting line-up for the encounter.
Villa make four changes to the side that defeated Cardiff City in the FA Cup last Friday night, with Axel Disasi, Tyrone Mings, Lucas Digne and Morgan Rogers coming in to replace Andres Garcia, Lamare Bogarde, Ian Maatsen and Marco Asensio.
READ MORE: Major boost for Villa as key quartet available to face Club Brugge
There’s good news on the bench too as Matty Cash, Pau Torres and Boubacar Kamara are all included as we continue to recover key injured players, and so our squad continues to get stronger by the game as we head into a critical run-in to end the campaign.
Having lost on our previous visit to Club Brugge in the league phase of the Champions League earlier this season, we’ll be hoping for a better outcome this time round to put ourselves in a strong position to advance ahead of the second leg, but we’ll certainly need to produce a much better performance on this occasion.
Having been restored to the Villa XI, Mings gets a chance at redemption in particular after it was his costly blunder that saw us fall to defeat on our last visit, and this is now the time where Villa must start producing solid defensive displays on the road to give ourselves a strong foundation to go out and win the game.
It remains to be seen how we set up at the back with Ezri Konsa perhaps being deployed at right-back or Disasi takes up the role of the right-sided defender in a back three, but regardless of the system, we have to keep things tight at the back for a full 90 minutes, and allow our attacking quality both in the starting line-up and on the bench to make the difference and help us take a big step towards advancing to the next round.
Your Aston Villa team to face Club Brugge 🟣#UCL || #UpTheVilla pic.twitter.com/HZdHfybDD2
— Aston Villa (@AVFCOfficial) March 4, 2025
