Aston Villa is the team of the hour in the Premier League. That has a lot to do with the coach Unai Emery. He dreams big and works small. And with Ollie Watkins, he hits and hits and hits.
Last weekend when Aston Villa in the Premier League against Newcastle United, fans of the club sang their new hero. It’s a short song, the lyrics are simple, the melody catchy. It’s about the club boss Christian Purslow, who went to Spain in his sports car in search of a new coach and actually found one, namely “super Unai Emery.”
According to everything that has been read and heard, Purslow did not drive a Lamborghini the 2000 kilometers from Birmingham, England, to Villarreal, Spain. He took a plane instead. But that’s true about Unai Emery, he’s been coaching Aston Villa since early November.
Emery has coached for clubs such as Arsenal and Paris Saint Germain worked. And he has won the Europa League four times with two Spanish clubs, no coach can match that. Most recently he reached the semi-finals of the Champions League with the small Villarreal FC and not only annoyed Bayern.
Dreams that could become reality
And now Villa, sixth in the Premier League at the time. Only one point separated the club from a relegation zone. Of course, Emery talked about the relegation battle at his presentation, but he preferred to talk about dreams. He’s always liked to do that.
Once, Emery had just been confirmed as coach at Villarreal, he said: “Dreams are free and I dream of a title with Villarreal.” At the end of the season, Villarreal and Emery surprisingly won the Europa League.
And now, on the first day of November, Emery was dreaming again, he was about titles and Europe, only this time with Aston Villa. “My dream is to win a trophy with Aston Villa”said is. “My second dream is to play in Europe.”
Only Arsenal and Man City scored more points, says ‘Emery Table’
Less than six months have passed and Emery has transformed relegated Aston Villa into a side that can dream of their first European competition in more than a decade. After 31 of 38 match days, Villa are sixth in the table and something like the team of the hour in the Premier League.
Since Emery took office, only Arsenal and Manchester City have picked up more points in the league. That’s why the Emery table was sometimes read in England recently, for Villa it shows an average of 2.1 points per game. And then the team has also won seven of the last eight league games, most recently five in a row.
The last time the club did that was in 1998, and Villa eventually qualified for Europe. They would certainly have nothing against a parallelism of events in Birmingham.
About popcorn and the beauty of defending
The development of Aston Villa is then also closely linked to the person of the trainer Emery. He dreams of big things, but works on a small scale – that’s often the case in his career. And it always started with meticulousness and attention to detail. When he took up his first coaching position at FC Valencia in 2008, Emery was 36. He spent hours making videos of game sequences, his tactical training was detailed, too detailed for some in the squad.
One of the players was Joaquín, an attacking player, a free spirit too. Once, after Emery lectured on soccer, Joaquín said: “He showed so many videos, I ran out of popcorn.”
Emery’s influence can also be seen at Aston Villa, but nobody there seems to be bothered by tactical training. He settled on a 4-4-2 formation early on, which he sometimes changes to a 4-2-3-1. Since then, Aston Villa has defended in such a structured way that some may discover beauty in it. Goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez, world champion with Argentina, has conceded just two goals in the last eight league games.
And with the ball, Villa often has an idea. Of course, this is due to individualists like the six Douglas Luiz, who plays fine passes and rarely loses the ball. But it’s also because of Emery’s idea of football. Many years ago, when he was in charge of Arsenal, he once said he envisioned a kind of ‘chameleon football’. Football, said Emery, consists of different phases – and for each one needs a plan. For the ball possession game, the game against the ball, for the switching actions.
Aston Villa – where dreams are possible again
One who is apparently made for “chameleon football” is attacker Ollie Watkins, 27. Aston Villa paid a lot of money for Watkins almost three years ago, and Watkins has repaid it with goals. Only the start of this season was not successful. When Emery took over, Watkins had scored just two goals in fourteen league games. Since then he has been hitting and hitting and hitting, in the past twelve games alone he has scored eleven times.
Watkins scored twice against Newcastle at the weekend and national team manager Gareth Southgate was somewhere in the stands. He too will know that nobody in the Premier League is scoring as regularly as Watkins, not even Erling Haaland. And so Watkins can then dream again that at some point he will still get the chance of an eighth international match.
Perhaps that is also a connecting element: that at Villa everyone feels that more could be done, the fans, the coach Emery, the goalscorer Watkins. Spring 2023 is a time when dreaming is possible again for all those loyal to Aston Villa.