As Unai Emery prepares his Aston Villa side for the visit of Leicester City this weekend, a familiar looking defensive unit could be key to addressing a big problem.
Villa have now failed to keep a clean sheet in our last five games across all competitions, and in that time, we’ve conceded 10 goals.
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It’s a reoccurring issue for this team as we’ve conceded far too many goals again already this season, with 31 GA in our opening 19 Premier League games giving us the worst defensive record of the top 11 sides in the standings.
That is simply not good enough or sustainable if we want to move up the table and compete at the top, and so Emery has a critical challenge this week to determine what he can do to help fix the problem.
“This league is very tight and we have to try to improve and correct why we are conceding a lot of goals,” the Villa boss said after the Brighton game.
With Pau Torres suffering what is likely to be a serious injury this week, that forces Emery’s hand anyway, as Tyrone Mings will now come into the side for a consistent run of games as he looks to re-establish himself in the Villa starting line-up.
However, we must now settle on a solid backline that will deliver clean sheets, and it may well be a case of going back to what has served us well previously with Matty Cash, Ezri Konsa, Mings and Lucas Digne forming the back four.
While Mings gives us physicality, presence and height along with his other defensive qualities, Konsa must now be deployed as a centre-half week in and week out, as we’ve seen enough from him at right-back to know that it doesn’t suit him or us as he’s limited in possession further up the pitch and looks vulnerable against pacy wide players in terms of being dragged out of position.
The Mings-Konsa partnership has to be the heart of this defence again, and that in turn means Digne and Cash must provide balance and solidity in the full-back positions, something that they haven’t always provided, but it’s backs-against-the-wall time to essentially say, you shall not pass.
It could be argued that we need to start seeing more of Ian Maatsen as we spent a significant fee on the Dutchman last summer and although Digne has been dependable this season, we bought his teammate for a reason and he must get a run of games to showcase his ability and what he can bring to the team.
The argument in favour of seeing more of Kosta Nedeljkovic on the opposite side is losing pace once again with Cash now back from suspension, and so a January loan exit would likely make sense for the talented youngster as it doesn’t appear as though he’ll get minutes with us this year.
Protection from the likes of Boubacar Kamara, Amadou Onana and Youri Tielemans in front of them must also come though, but our defence has to step up in the coming weeks and stop leaking goals. While part of that comes down to defensive structure and the collective being harder to beat with a better balance as we’re not short of goals scored, we’ve got to start doing the basics right such as winning duels, cutting out mistakes and not switching off either early or late in games, as we’ve been doing.
That starts against Leicester this weekend as a clean sheet and three points would be the perfect way to start 2025, but if we wish to kick on and climb the table in the coming months, we have to find long-term solutions at the back as the porous nature of our defence again this season continues to be one of our biggest weaknesses.
