Aston Villa goalkeeper Joe Gauci has conceded that his adaptation at the club has been difficult, but he’s starting to see progress and improvement.
The 23-year-old arrived in January having made 76 appearances for Adelaide Utd, as he caught the eye of Villa’s scouting and recruitment team to earn him the switch to join us.
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Gauci also has one cap for Australia to his name, and so he’ll hope that he has a big future ahead for both club and country in the coming years as he looks to take the next big step in his career.
Naturally, with Emiliano Martinez established as our first-choice goalkeeper, it will be difficult for him to get regular playing time, while he’s also seen Robin Olsen sit ahead of him in the pecking order this past season.
However, the expectation is that he will gradually move into that second spot and offer a long-term solution for Villa, and so those initial months at the club would have been vital for him to settle in, adapt and show improvement as he learns what Unai Emery and the Villa coaching staff want from him.
In an honest response, Gauci conceded that it has been difficult for him to adapt to the level in England, but he believes that coupled with Villa’s patience and hard work with him, he started to see the benefits of the approach and coaching in the last part of the campaign to be able to show signs of progress and make improvements as a player.
“Instead of having one game at the end of the week to aim on like I did at Adelaide, every training session (at Villa) is like a game for me because it’s an opportunity to perform at a high level and to try to get better,” he said, as per News.com.au. “There’s probably not a bigger jump you can make in the football world than from Australia to the (English) Premier League.
“I never really expected the jump to be that big. I guess I was always aiming for the heights of the top leagues in Europe but to make that jump, the level is definitely a lot different. There’s been an adaptation period, and they’ve made that quite clear to me that it’s going to take me some time to settle in.
“There’s a lot of factors that have gone into that. It definitely hasn’t been easy adapting to the level and finding my routine but as my time has progressed, probably the last six to eight weeks of the season, I felt much more settled and it felt like I was able to really be myself and express myself on the field.
“With the adjustments that they’ve made to me as a goalkeeper, I was starting to feel that improvement and it’s all started to click.”
Olsen, 34, has one year remaining on his current Villa contract, but it remains to be seen if there’s a decision on his future in the coming weeks to determine if there will be an earlier exit to open up a path for Gauci to become increasingly involved.
With the opportunity to continue to work with him over pre-season and give him invaluable playing time to gain experience and familiarity with the defensive line at Villa, time will tell if we’ll see a shift in the pecking order with the Australian shot-stopper looking to get a promotion and play a more prominent role next season.
