Aston Villa against Forest: Premier League Match Preview
Preamble
Welcome everyone to this English top-flight fixture between Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. The home side are the expected winners to win in this early kick-off as they are flying this season and are currently sitting third, while Nottingham Forest are seventeenth and just four points outside of the relegation zone.
Each side are entering the game on the back of a setback as Villa were beaten 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest succumbed 2-0 to Everton.
This shapes up as a challenging task for Forest to come away with all three points with Villa boasting one of the best home forms in Europe at the moment and they also set a club record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But perhaps it’s new year, new story? All will become clear very soon.
The team news will be announced shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The team news is in. Unai Emery has made a quartet of alterations to his first eleven who lost 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 also made four changes to their matchday 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 fantastic job as a manager there. Their signings 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 definitely a challenging game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve played against some of the larger clubs, or the ones that are favoured every year, and performed admirably against them - and a couple of teams maybe not as fancied, we haven't performed as strongly against them. That’s likely the challenge of the group - rising to the challenge of each game rather than just the major fixtures."
Squad News
The midfielder has will not be staying at Aston Villa, an update that was confirmed by the manager Unai Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss commented:
"We respect him all we can because he’s a excellent professional, very respectful. The issue we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is featuring regularly, we are obligated to buy him. We decided two months ago we are not convinced to make the move permanent, committing the money we would need to."
Season Snapshot
How times change. This time last year Forest were third in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have altered, including the manager twice and Sean Dyche is tasked 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.
