Fixtures
- Aston Villa Vs. Wolverhampton Wanderers – Sat, Mar 30th 2024, 17:30
Unai Emery was in front of the cameras for his pre-match press conference on Friday.
Aston Villa’s head coach previewed Saturday’s clash against Wolves, offering a team news update to assembled journalists.
Here’s what he had to say…
On team news…
“Bad news with Matty Cash. After playing with his national team, he came back with a small injury.
“He’s not available for tomorrow. Jacob Ramsey is progressing well and we are going to train this afternoon and we will decide if he can help us or not tomorrow.”
On Cash he added: “For Saturday he is not available – maybe two or three weeks more.”
On Ezri Konsa’s England exploits…
When asked how international football can help the defender, he said: “It’s very important. Firstly, for his performances – he’s progressing a lot.
“We can help every player try to get comfortable playing with our structure, and one of them is Konsa.
“Everything that happens, after playing here with us, with their national team is fantastic.”
On the team’s home form…
“We played against Newcastle and they showed us their potential; we played against Chelsea and they showed us their potential; we played against Manchester United and they showed us their potential, and we played against Tottenham and it was the same.
“We have to learn and try to get better analysing those matches against those teams. We accepted those results against those teams, but my idea is to try to increase our level when we are playing against teams like that.
“Tomorrow Wolverhampton is going to be very difficult. We want to get our best performances at home in Villa Park with our supporters. We want to play with personality and impose and dominate with our positioning on the pitch.
“Sometimes we are getting it, sometimes not. Tomorrow is a big challenge about how we can play at home being comfortable, being strong. We have to try to play with personality in our structure, dominating the match.”
On Youri Tielemans’ best position…
“We try to exploit his best potential as a player: his skills, his capacity to assist, his capacity to get into the opponent’s box with his clarity, sometimes scoring goals. We try to avoid his weaknesses.
“With us, more or less, he’s playing like he played with his national team. We can speak about him with numbers – six, eight, ten – he’s a mix of those.”
On Wolves…
“They are a very, very competitive team. Their coach is doing a really good job. They play with personality in every match, facing different teams.
“Even against the top four or seven teams they were successful. Tomorrow is going to be very difficult because to impose our positioning, to impose our capacity is not easy because they are going to try to avoid it.
“How? We are trying to analyse and understand quickly on the pitch but, more or less, with a lot of duels. When they are with the ball they have good organisation to play in combination.
“We are ready to play tomorrow respecting them a lot.”
