Villa against Forest: Top-Flight Build-Up
Preamble
Greetings and welcome to this Premier League encounter between Aston Villa and Forest. Villa will be the favourites to win in this early kick-off as they are soaring this season and are currently occupying third place, while Nottingham Forest are 17th and just four points outside of the drop zone.
The two teams are entering the game following a loss as Villa were overcome 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest lost 2-0 to Everton.
This shapes up as a difficult task for the visitors to obtain all three points with Villa having one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also achieved a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But maybe it’s a new year and a new narrative? We will find out very soon.
The team news will be released shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The starting XIs have been announced. The Villa boss has made four changes to his starting lineup who lost 4-1 to Arsenal last time around.
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 starting squad after a 2-0 defeat to Everton.
Nott’m 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 remarked on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a excellent job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been impressive - spent a lot of money, to be fair, on some excellent players and they’ve moulded it into a good unit, so certainly a challenging game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve played against some of the larger clubs, or the ones that are tipped every year, and done very well against them - and a couple of teams maybe not as highly-rated, we struggled more against them. That’s probably the challenge of the group - rising to the challenge of each game rather than just the big games."
Player Situation
Harvey Elliott has no future at Aston Villa, news that was stated by the manager Unai Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss stated:
"We respect him as much as possible because he’s a very good professional, very respectful. The problem we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is featuring regularly, we must buy him. We made the decision two months ago we are not convinced to make the move permanent, spending 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 shifted, including the manager on two occasions and the current boss is charged 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 outside the bottom three with 19 games of the season to go.
