Aston Villa boss Unai Emery has again reiterated what he wants to see from his players as we try to improve our home form this weekend.
Villa host Crystal Palace on Saturday afternoon looking to build on another impressive away win last time out at Everton, but having lost back-to-back home games 4-2 against Arsenal and Leicester City respectively, there is a clear need to be better in front of the Villa faithful.
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Emery has been clear in what he believes will help solve the issue, and he explained what he’s looking for again on Friday in his pre-Palace press conference, with the emphasis on controlling the game, cutting out mistakes that lead to conceding easy goals and being consistent in trying to establish our style of play and identity both in and out of possession.
“We are being competitive, but not every match at home,” he told reporters. “Now, the challenge is at home. At home, we have to impose our idea, we have to be in control of the game with ball possession, good positioning, trying to not concede easy goals to our opponents and of course we have to be consistent.
“We have to be more compact than we are. We conceded 11 goals in three matches, we lost the last two matches at home, and of course, it’s not the way I want to play in our match tomorrow against Crystal Palace.
“We have to be consistent, a clean sheet is the way to a win. It’s very important to try to keep here our same spirit that we had at Everton last weekend, and we have to add our supporters. We have to be comfortable with them, try to connect with them, but we have to control our mind, our idea, our tactical decisions in our game-plan tomorrow and we want to win through a clean sheet.”
Emery was then specifically asked about Tyrone Mings and his role in the side in both phases of the game, and while the Villa boss gave a balanced assessment of our commanding centre-half, he was keen to focus on the collective responsibility of the entire team to play the way he wants with possession and control.
Further, he reiterated his point about consistency in terms of playing out from the back successfully and developing our style, as although sometimes we’ve done it well and other times not so well, the point is that we will persist until we’re consistently effective with it.
When speaking about our last two games against Arsenal and Everton, Emery insisted that both games could have gone either way given the chances created on both sides, but the key difference against the latter at Goodison Park, was the way in which we managed the game after taking the lead and stuck to our game-plan and process over 90 minutes before killing it off with Emiliano Buendia’s goal.
Emery was clear that every match is difficult and poses different questions and challenges, and fundamentally it starts with the team performance in keeping a clean sheet and controlling the game to put ourselves in the strongest possible position to then go on and win the game.
Time will tell if the game-plan and instructions being drilled into the players in training this week will be successfully executed on the pitch, but that’s the challenge facing them on Saturday and it’s hoped that we can pick up three important points as we look to not only put distance between ourselves and Palace below us, but try to finally break into the top half of the table.