Morgan Rogers insists that our Champions League quarter-final tie with Paris Saint-Germain is far from over, as he backs Aston Villa to turn it around after a 3-1 loss in the first leg.
The 22-year-old gave us the lead in the French capital on Wednesday night as he bagged his 14th goal of the season along with 11 assists in 45 appearances across all competitions, but the quality of the Ligue 1 champions was too much as they struck back either side of half-time to take the lead, before a late third was added in a potentially decisive moment in the tie.
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While it was undoubtedly a struggle and required a huge effort from the players to cope with PSG’s relentless pressing and quality in possession, we’re certainly not entirely out of the tie at this stage as we look to overturn our two-goal deficit at Villa Park next week, and the message coming from Unai Emery and the squad is that we’re very much still in this.
It will of course require a massive shift once again matched with quality to get the better of Luis Enrique’s side, but there is no doubting the belief and confidence within the Villa camp that we have the ability to hurt them at home, and Rogers is backing us to still be in with a chance of advancing to the last four of the competition.
“We’ve got loads of belief in the changing room,” Rogers said, as quoted by the club’s site. “We’ve got nothing to lose, no-one had us to win the tie in the first place.
“So, why not just go for it? That’s the mentality I have, that’s the mentality everyone has and the manager as well. We’ve just got to keep going for it and keep believing we can do it and see where it takes us. We’ve definitely got the quality to turn this around – it’s not done yet.
“We’ve got quality in our dressing room, we know that. We’re here for a reason, we’re not just here to compete. We want to fight, we want to try to win and we want to try and score goals. Normally, we’ve got enough quality in the room to cause any team in the world problems.
“I think we did at times tonight, probably liked to have a bit more, but now we’re going back home and that’s where we know our best form and the way we play is better at home this season. We’ll be looking forward to it and hopefully we can win.
“It was difficult, they’re a really good team, really well organised and have stars all over the pitch. It’s difficult, we knew we were in a fight, we knew we had to defend well and battle. Overall, we did, probably just a bit of quality from them and maybe errors or a little bit of something that happened that probably we could prevented for the goals.
“But that’s football, that’s what happens.
“We’ve got another leg to try and turn it around, we’re going to go for everything and try to win the tie and we’ll see where it takes us.”
On one hand, it could be argued that the shackles are off for Villa now and in the return leg we have no choice but to take the game to PSG as we look to score at least twice without reply to force the tie to go into extra-time.
That could suit us in terms of giving the players more freedom and courage to play our way as opposed to trying to contain our rivals, but conversely, the French giants could relish that prospect and pull us apart with their quality as we leave ourselves more open and exposed.
It will be a fine balancing act for Emery who must formulate a winning gameplan, while the players will have to be perfect at either end of the pitch and produce a momental shift in the middle of the pitch to try and dictate and control proceedings more effectively, but there is no doubt in Rogers’ mind at least that we can still launch a comeback and produce what would be a major upset.
