Chelsea vs Aston Villa: A Telling Day

After a break felt like a lifetime, Villa head to Stamford Bridge level on points with Chelsea. It’s a big match for both clubs, with Villa looking up and Chelsea bumbling around mid-table trying to salvage something. The simplest way of looking at it from a Villa perspective is do the squad have enough belief to edge past the hosts into the top half?

Chelsea, while obviously boasting a better squad on paper, have been out of sorts all season with both Tuchel and Potter. Big spending hasn’t brought instant results. The pressure on Potter has become almost suffocating. I doubt he ever got death threats at Brighton. Three points today would certainly give them something to hold onto.

For Villa, beating Chelsea and moving top-half is a big mental obstacle more than anything. Looking up and basically safe, the season now is about aspiration. And they find themselves with a golden opportunity to make a bold statement. But do they really have it in them to think they belong in Europe? And can they show that belief by defeating European quality on the road when the opponent needs a win?

At the same time, Villa really have nothing to lose. They’re far enough away from the relegation pack that there’s no specter looming over their shoulders. But if the individual players think they should be part of the project, think they are good enough to be in that mix at the top, then they have to be looking at games like this as opportunities. They have to be looking at the fixtures and saying, “Leicester, Forest, Brentford, Fulham…we should be winning those. Newcastle, United…No reason we can’t at least get something.”

It’s all about grabbing the ring rather than avoiding embarrassment.

Naturally, we’ll expect Unai to have taken advantage of the break to work out the plan and drill some of them on it. We hear about Emery’s long meetings, and I’ve wondered what makes them so long? Then watched a snippet with Ollie, and it’s hard for me to believe that up to now, the side haven’t been watching entire games together and critiquing every moment and touch.

I’d have thought that was a given, but apparently not. “Here, you could take a moment, here you could’ve done this instead.” In the NFL, each week each group (offensive line, receivers and running backs, etc) painstakingly goes through the film: each play is analyzed, each player is graded on every play. I’m just a bit astonished that a similar level of scrutiny hasn’t been applied at Villa. Because we all know it’s very fine margins, but more important, it’s about everyone seeing the game the same way, all the good and the bad.

Sessions like this are also about accountability. Everyone needs to be hearing that yeah, X could’ve played the ball sooner, but also where was Y for that pass? Or was the option Z, instead? Or, you didn’t need to try that pass: settle, turn, play it back and reset. This is how a manager should be getting his thoughts across.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that they’ll go in with a winning idea they just have to execute, and will increasingly understand what ‘executing’ it means, exactly, player by player.

So. We’ve all seen the form stats, the points haul, all the flashes of progress and understanding since Emery arrived. It’s understandable that we can go into today actually expecting something based on a little bit more than a feeling or a moment of magic. If you want to be in Europe, you have to play any team convinced you can get something, and that doing so isn’t about heroics, but just going out and executing the plan and playing to your potential.

(We can also be forgiven for our reflexive belief that Villa are the team you want to play when you really need a result.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this, for once. Won’t be the end if we lose, might be the case that a draw is a fantastic result. But I really am curious just how far we’ve come now that the team have bounced back nicely from the three-loss spell. Will we see a side that at least holds onto the point they’d earned against Arsenal, for example?

Whether or not I think Villa are actually ready as a squad for European football, at this moment, like everyone else, I’d like nothing more than an exciting run-in based on optimism and positive attainment. Much like the run that got us out of the Championship.

Over to you.