Aston Villa 4-1 Newcastle United - 19/04/2025

[joeyt]

I'm sure I read on nufc.com that we were on course for our best ever away season

 

We're 3rd in the away league table behind Arsenal and Liverpool

[TRon]

On 20/04/2025 at 20:04, Palestoon said:

We really saw 2 sides of the coin yesterday. Villa gave us a taste of our own medicine, but also showed us the recipe/what we're lacking to deal with it, that they have.

 

Best way generally to beat an effective press (unless your peak City) is to simply bypass it. 

 

Villa have 3 players in their front 6 who are excellent with their backs to goal (Rogers, McGinn and Watkins)

But rather than lump balls over the top for Burn to mop up all day, they played direct passes across the ground. Forced our unathletic back line to chase them around, and then held up the ball, and waited for the runners to come in. It worked all day. This is what teams like Bournemouth fulham and Brighton have done to us. 

 

It's why getting some mobile CBs is critical if we want to play this high pressing man to man style. We have no recovery pace in the defense. As soon as a ball goes forward and it sticks, it feels like all our defenders are struggling to get goal side.

 

And on the flip side, I think it exposed what our problems are offensively when teams press us high. They basically surround our midfielders and dare us to play directly into the attackers. 

 

Our front line is amazing on the front foot, but back to goal is a major issue. Isak struggles to hold up the ball against strong CBs, and Gordon and Murphy are not technical enough to receive the ball under pressure and turn it into a positive situation.

 

Hope it's something we look into addressing in the summer. We need to add another dimension to our attack

 

 

Felt like that was happening in midfield as well, we were attempting to press all over the pitch, but they held the ball well and sent runners away into space.

[The Prophet]

It wasn't too dissimilar to the City game in a lot of respects.

 

When the man for man press works, it's brilliant, but when it doesn't, our paceless defence is dragged all over the show.

 

You can see why we pursued Guehi, but it'd be nice to see a bit more tactical flexibility in these situations until we can buy a fix. 

 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by The Prophet

[AyeDubbleYoo]

I expected us to sit back more after half time, but it wasn't really in the plan I guess. 

 

TBF we started the second half quite well IIRC, just the underlying tactical situation hadn't really changed enough. 

[TRon]

Just now, AyeDubbleYoo said:

I expected us to sit back more after half time, but it wasn't really in the plan I guess. 

 

TBF we started the second half quite well IIRC, just the underlying tactical situation hadn't really changed enough. 

 

Given that we were playing 3 games in 7 days, you could argue we should have played a more conservative game and that way we wouldn't have needed to match Villa's energy, which with their resources, was definitely a level above ours. But hard to argue changing a gameplan when we'd won 5 on the bounce. But in hindsight we didn't really have the legs to go toe to toe with them.