Unai Emery makes Aston Villa team selection point ahead of vital Tottenham clash

The manager of Aston Villa, Unai Emery, has stated that the forthcoming Premier League encounter against Tottenham had no bearing on his choice of players for Thursday’s Europa Conference League match, which ended in a 0-0 tie with Ajax.

Villa played a less than stellar first-leg match in Amsterdam as a result of Emery’s numerous roster changes, which included the absence of players like John McGinn, Matty Cash, and Leon Bailey. With a win over Spurs on Sunday, Villa can move up to the top four and qualify for the Champions League. They now have a short window of time to prepare for this important match.

Spurs need to win on Sunday in order to catch up to Emery’s team, who have played one more game than the north Londoners, since they are presently five points behind Villa. When questioned on Thursday night about his lineup selection, Emery responded, “Not really thinking about Sunday because we decided the starting XI with the players with Morgan (Rodgers) and Tim (Iroegbunam) because we didn’t have one player like Tim after (Boubacar) Kamara got injured.”

“With Tim, we have to play with players who have experience, just like Ajax has a lot of young players. We chose to play with Pau Torres, although we were aware that playing with him for 90 minutes would be risky.”McGinn, I would rather not take a chance since he was unsure and had a minor ache. In general, though, I was attempting to be encouraging to those players, the game wasn’t under our control as much as we would have liked.”Due to the outcome and the way the match is progressing, the strategy was not entirely accurate before the game. I believe that tactically we needed to make a change, which we did. We also opted to play 45 minutes with Pau as per the plan.”