Villa v Forest: Top-Flight Preview
Opening Thoughts
Welcome everyone to this Premier League fixture between Villa and Forest. The home side are the expected winners to win in this lunchtime start as they are excelling this season and are currently sitting third, while Nottingham Forest are seventeenth and just a handful of points outside of the drop zone.
Both clubs are entering the game following a defeat as Villa were overcome 4-1 by top-of-the-table Arsenal and Forest lost 2-0 to Everton.
This shapes up as a tough task for the visitors to obtain all three points with Villa boasting one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also achieved a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But perhaps it’s a new year and a new narrative? All will become clear very soon.
The confirmed XIs will be released shortly before the start at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The lineups have been confirmed. The Villa boss has made a quartet of alterations to his first eleven who were defeated by 4-1 to Arsenal in their previous match.
Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Bench: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Nottingham Forest have likewise made four changes to their starting squad after a 2-0 defeat to Everton.
Nott’m Forest: Victor, Williams, Murillo, Anderson, Gibbs-White, Dominguez, I Jesus, Hutchinson, Bakwa, Milenkovic, Aina.
Bench: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Manager Comments
Forest boss Sean Dyche has remarked on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a great job as a manager there. Their recruitment has been impressive - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some very good players and they’ve moulded it into a good unit, so certainly a challenging game.
We’ve just shown lately, we’ve played against some of the top sides, or the ones that are favoured every year, and done very well against them - and a couple of teams perhaps not as highly-rated, we struggled more against them. That’s probably the challenge of the group - meeting the expectation of each game rather than just the big games."
Player Situation
The midfielder has no future at Aston Villa, an update that was revealed by the manager Emery in the lead-up to this match. The boss commented:
"I am respecting him as much as possible because he’s a top professional, very respectful. The issue we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is featuring regularly, we must buy him. We decided two months ago we are not convinced to make the move permanent, spending the money we need."
Season Snapshot
The tables have turned. This time last year Forest were in third place in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have changed, including the manager on two occasions and Sean Dyche is charged with keeping the club in the Premier League this season. Since being named manager on 21 October, Dyche has won 10 Premier League points and the side are just outside the bottom three with 19 games of the season to go.
