Emery back with a point to prove
New Villa boss ready to put Arsenal flop behind him
UNAI EmERY’S task of reviving Aston Villa will be relatively simple compared with what he faced as a young manager at Valencia.
The Spaniard, who turned 51 on Thursday, arrives at Villa Park with the team above the relegation zone by a single point. They have won only three times this season and have significant flaws at both ends of the pitch. ‘ Big challenge ahead,’ read the tweet from Emery’s official account on Wednesday morning.
Yet given what Emery experienced 14 years ago, Villa should be a walk in the park. During the 2008-09 season, his first at the club, it emerged that Valencia were about £500million in debt and players had been unpaid for weeks.
The team had battled relegation the previous season but, in his first role at a major club, Emery took all this in his stride and came within a whisker of qualifying for the Champions League. The following season, Valencia finished third and returned to Europe’s top table.
Emery’s quality as a coach is beyond doubt, as his 11 trophies — including four Europa League triumphs — attest. Though his first task is to pull Villa clear of the drop zone, billionaire owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens have hired Emery because he took Valencia and Sevilla, clubs of comparable size, into European competition and did well there.
Emery immediately set himself a target of winning Villa’s first major trophy since 1996, and has already watched every one of Villa’s games this season.
‘I am more ready now than the first time I was in England,’ said Emery. ‘I want to be here for a long time. The owners have the same dreams, to be ambitious and to improve.’
It will be fascinating to see how Emery’s workaholic personality and fierce demands will be received, and whether he has learned lessons from his 18 months at Arsenal, which ended with the sack in November 2019.
Under Steven Gerrard, training was intense but relatively short, with players able to return to their families once their work was done. The squad had better get used to longer hours under Emery.
Whereas Gerrard left much of the training- ground duties to his coaches, Emery patrols the pitches, clipboard in hand, at the heart of everything. The number of days off players are granted is likely to be reduced drastically and there is expected to be huge emphasis on video analysis, with these sessions lasting up to two hours.
Training can also be monotonous, with Emery settling on a plan for a specific opponent and then drilling his players until they have perfected it.
All the indications are that Emery will prefer a basic 4-2-3-1 shape, with the emphasis on defensive organisation and rapid counter-attacks. Nothing is off the cuff and there is little room for levity in training, either: Emery is extremely serious about football and he expects similar dedication from those he leads. During games he is always on the move, directing every pass from the technical area and forever pondering changes.
‘You have to have huge respect for the way he can set up a team,’ says Terry Gibson, the former
Tottenham and manchester United forward who is a regular pundit on La Liga TV. ‘But I don’t anticipate free-flowing football at the start. If the players buy into it, they may well have some success along the way.’
At Arsenal, Emery was regarded as a brilliant coach who sometimes struggled to communicate his ideas.
Though players who know Emery have enormous respect for his coaching, most know little of the man beyond his total obsession with football. During his time in north London, Emery maintained a laser focus on results that left little time for anything else. When he left, both he and the club had regrets.
Yet Emery and Villa could be the perfect fit. Transfer policy should be smoother than under Gerrard, whose preference for tried-andtested players contrasted with sporting director Johan Lange’s mission to find young talent and undervalued gems.
Emery knows Villarreal to be willing sellers and it would be no surprise should Villa target their players, such as Arnaut Danjuma or Nicolas Jackson, in January.
While this squad has talent, it lacks the structure and discipline that an experienced coach can bring.
It might not be fun every day, but if Villa follow Emery’s methods they will surely move up the table. Emery watched his first opponents manchester United 17 times before beating them in the 2021 Europa League final and will be ready for them again, both on Sunday and in the Carabao Cup at Old Trafford four days later.
Similarly, Emery may need to adapt a little more to the culture of British football but the bottom line is that Villa have hired a serial winner, with an appetite for a challenge. Just ask Valencia.