Villa versus Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Preview
Opening Thoughts
Greetings and welcome to this English top-flight fixture between Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. Aston Villa are the expected winners to win in this early kick-off as they are excelling this season and are currently occupying third place, while Nottingham Forest are seventeenth and just four points outside of the drop zone.
The two teams are entering the game on the back of a loss as Villa were overcome 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest succumbed 2-0 to Everton.
This promises to be a difficult task for the visitors to obtain all three points with Villa possessing one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also set a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But maybe it’s new year, new story? We will find out very soon.
The starting lineups will drop shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Starting Elevens
The starting XIs have been announced. Unai Emery has made a quartet of alterations to his starting XI who lost 4-1 to Arsenal last time out.
Aston Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Substitutes: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Forest have also made four adjustments to their starting squad after a 2-0 loss to Everton.
Nottingham Forest: Victor, Williams, Murillo, Anderson, Gibbs-White, Dominguez, I Jesus, Hutchinson, Bakwa, Milenkovic, Aina.
Substitutes: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Dugout Insights
Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche has commented on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a excellent job as a manager there. Their recruitment has been good - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some excellent players and they’ve forged it into a good unit, so certainly a tough game.
We’ve just shown lately, we’ve taken on some of the larger clubs, or the ones that are favoured every year, and performed admirably against them - and a couple of teams perhaps not as highly-rated, we haven’t done as well against them. That’s probably the test of the group - meeting the challenge of each game rather than just the major fixtures."
Squad News
Harvey Elliott has no future at Aston Villa, an update that was confirmed by the manager Unai Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss commented:
"I am respecting him as much as possible because he’s a excellent professional, very respectful. The issue we have with Harvey is this year he is on loan and if he is featuring regularly, we are obligated to buy him. We decided two months ago we are not convinced to sign him, committing the money we need."
Season Snapshot
What a difference a year makes. This time last year Forest were third in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have altered, including the manager on two occasions and Sean Dyche is tasked with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being named manager on 21 October, Dyche has accumulated 10 Premier League points and the side are just outside the bottom three with 19 games of the season remaining.
