Villa versus Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Preview
Preamble
Greetings and welcome to this Premier League clash between Aston Villa and Forest. The home side are the expected winners to win in this lunchtime start as they are soaring this season and are currently in third, while Nottingham Forest are seventeenth and just a handful of points outside of the drop zone.
The two teams are coming into the game off of the back of a setback as Villa were overcome 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest fell 2-0 to Everton.
This promises to be a challenging task for Forest to come away with all three points with Villa boasting one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also recorded a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But maybe it’s a new year and a new narrative? All will become clear very soon.
The starting lineups will be announced shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Starting Elevens
The lineups have been confirmed. The Villa boss has made four changes to his starting XI 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.
Forest have likewise made four changes to their matchday squad after a 2-0 loss 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.
Pre-Match Quotes
Forest boss Sean Dyche has commented on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a great job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been impressive - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some very good players and they’ve moulded it into a strong side, so definitely a difficult game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve played against some of the bigger teams, or the ones that are fancied every year, and held our own against them - and a couple of teams perhaps not as fancied, we struggled more against them. That’s likely the challenge of the group - rising to the expectation of each game rather than just the big games."
Player Situation
Harvey Elliott has no future at Aston Villa, news that was confirmed by the manager Unai Emery in the lead-up to this match. The boss commented:
"We respect him all we can because he’s a top professional, very dedicated. The situation we have with Harvey is this year he is on loan and if he is playing matches, we must buy him. We made the decision two months ago we are not convinced to sign him, committing the money we would need to."
League Context
The tables have turned. This time last year Forest were third in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have changed, including the manager on two occasions and Sean Dyche is tasked with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being appointed on 21 October, Dyche has secured 10 Premier League points and the side are just above the bottom three with 19 games of the season to go.
