Aston Villa boss Unai Emery was pleased with his side’s focus and patience in our 2-0 win over Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League on Thursday night.
It was far from a memorable first-half performance from Villa, as we lacked rhythm, tempo and quality to our play which in turn led to difficulties in creating goalscoring opportunities against the visitors, who came with a gameplan to sit in their tight defensive shape and structure to frustrate us.
Importantly though, Villa found a breakthrough on the stroke of half-time through Ian Maatsen, and that in turn helped to open things up in the second half as both sides had chances.
Fortunately, Donyell Malen converted from the penalty spot to double our lead and ultimately made the win safe, but Emery noted that his side dominated having played with focus, while he also emphasised the importance of the experience we’ve gained playing in Europe in recent seasons that helped in this particular game.
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“Good evening. Focus and respecting the competition and the teams,” he said, as quoted by BBC Sport. “We were playing solidly and playing seriously. We conceded more chances than we planned. They needed to get something here and they played very focused. Overall, we dominated.
“We used our passion and our experience in Europe. Here at home in the Conference League two years ago, we have the experience and try to understand the difficulties. Do not be frustrated, try and use it to be passionate. It was coming in the second half.
“Very good because we need players who are scoring goals. Malen is scoring, Watkins is scoring and Maatsen is adding his quality in the opposition box and scoring goals.”
It’s hoped that Villa can take the momentum from this win into our clash with Bournemouth in the Premier League on Sunday, not only to sign off on a positive note ahead of the international break, but to now build another winning run heading into the festive period.
While Emery does make a great point about how previous experiences in Europe must now help this group deal with varying circumstances and particularly adversity when we face it, it’s also fair to say that we were far from our best in the first half in particular, and against a better side, we may well have been punished.
In turn, there is still improvement to come, but hopefully this is an important win and three points in our push to directly qualify for the knockout stage of the competition as we’ll now prepare to face Young Boys in our next European outing on November 27.