Aston Villa face Everton on Sunday afternoon, and we do so without the presence of Tyrone Mings in the heart of our defence.
The 30-year-old sustained a significant knee injury in our defeat to Newcastle Utd last weekend, and the expectation is that he’ll now miss most, if not all, of the current campaign.
Sign up for the Talk Villa newsletter, a free weekly Villa round-up delivered straight to you!
While that’s a major blow in itself given his influence and importance in the backline, concern increases when noting that Villa have won just one of 12 league games without Mings since he joined a permanent basis in 2019, and none of our last nine.
In those 12 outings, we’ve also conceded 24 goals. The numbers make for grim reading, and with the commanding centre-half now out for a significant period of time, Unai Emery and his players need to find a solution.
Mings has excelled under the Spanish tactician since he arrived last year, improving in all aspects of his game as he revealed last season that he is learning a huge amount about his position and how to develop as a player.
His importance started long before that though, as despite his tendency to make errors in the past, he was always a pillar of the Villa XI and a fundamental presence in the defence.
With his height, physicality, reading of the game, recovery pace, positioning and tactical awareness as well as an ever-improving ability in possession, he has proven to be a vital cog in the Villa XI. Add to that his leadership, organisation and experience, he has been pivotal in implementing our high defensive line under Emery, and we saw how disorganised it became after he went off last Saturday.
There is no doubt that we’re going to miss Mings this season, but it’s on those stepping in to fill that void to prove that we can be resilient and defensively sound without him.
It remains to be seen what Emery goes with on Sunday as he has versatility in his options. Will he feel as though we need a solid and settled centre-half pairing consistently and go with Ezri Konsa and Pau Torres?
Or will Torres be shifted to the left with Diego Carlos coming into the side alongside Konsa in the middle? With Matty Cash and Lucas Digne also in contention in the full-back roles, it will be fascinating to see what the Villa boss goes with this weekend.
The feeling is that we could see a Cash, Konsa, Carlos and Torres backline given we’re at home and will look to dominate and control possession starting from a back three. However, with Alex Moreno hopefully returning in the coming weeks, that will change when he’s available again.
While we have to not only write last Saturday off as a bad day at the office, we have to learn from it too. The shock of seeing Mings in such pain, being stretchered off with a protective brace on his knee would have unsettled his teammates, especially so soon after Emiliano Buendia’s knee injury in training just a few days earlier.
Having had time to process it now though, to settle back down and go to work this week in training and through Emery’s analysis to learn how to correct our mistakes, we’ll hopefully show on Sunday that we’re ready to deal with Mings’ absence in the best way possible.