Aston Villa’s ‘lazy’ defence is only part of the problem – Unai Emery is avoiding the elephant in the room

It took 337 minutes for Aston Villa to score their first Premier League goal this season, the longest that they have ever gone without opening their account at the start of a league year. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how many minutes it will be before they record their first win.

Unai Emery gave an appropriately withering assessment of his side’s form in the aftermath of Sunday’s 1-1 draw with a Sunderland side who were reduced to ten men but rarely looked short of manpower, describing his players as “lazy sometimes defensively” in his post-match press conference.

"We are not playing like I want," Emery added. “We have to recover our identity. Of course, we have to try to recover our personality, confidence and personality to play. I am frustrated for how we played, how we are not feeling comfortable with our style… We were not fighting.”

Few Villa fans would disagree with their coach’s assessment given the deflating nature of their performances, but is the defensive laziness or lack of identity and fighting spirit solely to blame? Or does Emery need to take a closer look at his own methods as he tries to identify the source of the rot that seems to have set in?

Unai Emery is right about Aston Villa’s defence – but that isn’t the only issue

The focus of Emery’s comments, when describing his own team’s apparent idleness, was the defence and in particular their commitment to reaching second balls and making life more challenging for the opposition. He isn’t far wide of the mark there.

Villa have only conceded five goals in their first five league games, which isn’t all that alarming, but have allowed the fourth most shots of any team in the top flight and 8.6xG’s worth of chances, second only to Burnley. On ‘average’, they can count themselves fortunate not to have conceded more.

A lack of pressure on loose balls and tight marking of defenders has certainly played its part, and they have poor at the back on an individual level – Villa players, for instance, have made just 43.1% of their tackles in one-on-one situations, the worst in the Premier League. Sunday’s opponents Sunderland, by comparison, have made 69.7% of their tackles in the same situations.

It's been far too easy to get at a Villa team whose defenders are too easily isolated and too inefficient at dealing with issues when they arise, and the energy levels in ground duels has been lacking.

Emery, of course, must shoulder the blame to an extent given that it is, ultimately, his job to ensure that his players are doing the fundamentals right and are motivated enough to scrap for second balls. But while describing the defence as “lazy” isn’t far wrong, it also fails to explain why Villa have been so desperately poor at the other end of the pitch as well. There, Emery has even bigger problems.

Why Villa’s old-fashioned attack has been so desperately poor

While Emery focussed on an undeniably weak defence when discussing their recent travails, their attack has been even worse. Despite having plenty of shots – their 64 attempts is fourth in the league – their total of 3.7xG is the worst in the Premier League and they have created very few meaningful openings across five matches.

A possible explanation for their creative blockage is Emery’s continued usage of what is, at this point, relatively old-fashioned overlapping wing-backs. In the tactical era in which the high press was becoming almost universal and defensive lines pushed further upfield, wing-backs became a reliable way to get in behind opposing defences who were susceptible to direct balls. There is, however, a reason that so many teams have moved away from the overlapping wing-back.

As teams got better and better at handling pressure on the ball and at exploiting high lines through quick counter-attacks, defensive lines started to get deeper again. Nearly every team in the Premier League – there are a few exceptions, such as Manchester City – have pushed their defence closer towards their own goal in recent years and have started to play more conservatively to handle the prevailing trend for fast counter-attacks which take high lines apart.

As such, the overlapping wing-back has become far less effective. Instead of being able to regularly get into positions from which they can cross the ball while the defence is still backtracking, they are having to work harder for space and cross from deeper positions into busier penalty areas. The percentages on overlapping play have become far worse, and lots of teams now prefer to have their full-backs enter the attacking phase inside the wingers instead, often moving away from traditional wing play almost entirely.

Emery, however, hasn’t changed. Lucas Digne and Matty Cash were still being asked to get down the touchline around the wingers, who sat much deeper than most teams would want these days. The result was a failure to get dangerous balls up to an increasingly isolated Ollie Watkins. Both Digne and Cash attempted three crosses against Sunderland, and none found a Villa player.

With the wingers deep and the full-backs largely ineffective - granted, Cash did score a screamer on Sunday, perhaps notably on a rare occasion on which he ventured infield – not only has Watkins been desperately isolated but so has Morgan Rogers. So often at his best last season when given attackers around him with which to make quick one-twos, Rogers has been cut adrift this year.

Rogers is, in essence, being asked to carry the team’s creative output without support, especially with so little coming from out wide. He has been poor, but that could have been mitigated by a system which didn’t emphasise him so much.

Watkins has come in for criticism, too, and his failure to connect with a presentable late chance has helped to paint the picture of a forward who is well short of his best, but he has also been given virtually nothing to work with – through five matches, he has been offered 1.1xG’s worth of chances. That’s desperately low for a team with European ambitions.

Ultimately, Villa are a team who are struggling both individually and as a collective, who look both undermotivated and poorly coached. Emery is more than capable enough as a manager to adapt and the talent is surely there to ensure that Villa stay well clear of relegation, but they need to adjust the system and, quite simply, buck up a bit.

The full-backs need to stay deeper and help the defence more, the wingers need to get further forward and closer to Rogers and Watkins, and the whole system needs to be more compact – else they will keep failing to create chances, and keep failing to score, and expose the defensive failings that were sometimes visible last year as well. There is a lot of work to be done, and little time to do it if they want to push for another year of continental campaigning in the future.