I watched every goal Aston Villa have conceded this season - and found two major concerns
Aston Villa’s recent form has damaged their chances of a top four spot - but what’s caused their decline?
It all started so well. Aston Villa started the season in impressive form, winning potentially tricky fixtures and apparently proving that their top four finish last season was far from a fluke. They beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League on an historic night at Villa Park. Nobody could even remember quite what Douglas Luiz looked like.
Over the past couple of weeks, however, it’s all come crashing down rather abruptly. They haven’t won in five matches and have lost four on the bounce. They were dismantled by an up-and-down Tottenham Hotspur side, brushed aside by league leaders Liverpool, and even humbled by Club Brugge. The international break comes at a very good time.
The question is whether this is just a blip, a temporary dip in form that is likely to be rectified sooner rather than later, or evidence of serious underlying problems. Are Villa just making a bit of a meal of things, or are opposing teams exploiting their weaknesses?
To find out, I decided to go back over every single goal that Unai Emery’s side have conceded since the start of the season and looked for underlying patterns, to see if I could detect weak spots that other sides might have noticed and targeted. I found two, and evidence that teams were very aware of them - they accounted for seven of the ten goals that Villa have conceded over their five-match run without a win.
The first is likely to have been picked up on by those who watch Aston Villa on a weekly basis. Their marking from crosses, both from dead balls and from open play, has been far too loose and has seen them undone regularly, and they have failed to find ways to prevent crosses at source, too. Of the 17 Premier League goals Villa have conceded this season, six have come directly from crosses, with another in the recent EFL Cup defeat to Crystal Palace.
A part of the problem appears to be the strict zonal marking system that Emery employs. Either Villa’s players are given too little leeway to adjust their positioning, or they lack the initiative or awareness to handle players coming at them from unexpected angles – just look at how easy it was for Evanilson to run, unchallenged and seemingly unnoticed, between two defenders to head in at the near post for Bournemouth in their 1-1 draw at the Vitality Stadium.
It's just a bit too easy to find space in the penalty area against Villa this season. The most egregious example was probably Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s goal to put Everton 2-0 up at Villa Park – no player should have a free header, six yards out, in the centre of the goal from a set piece – but there’s also Eberechi Eze wandering away from his marker without being followed in that EFL Cup game, Liam Delap finding half a yard in a crowded penalty area to score Ipswich Town’s first, and Brennan Johnson getting goal side of Lucas Digne to score Spurs’ equaliser.
Three of those last ten goals came directly from crosses, with the ease with which Evanilson found space standing out in particular. The curiosity is that Villa are not, by and large, bad at defending crosses. Spurs only completed two of 23 which they attempted in their defeat. Most balls into the box are handled well enough – but when the ball is put into space between or behind a defender, the attacker gets there first with alarming regularity.
The second point of possible weakness is one that was exploited ruthlessly by both Spurs and Liverpool, which is that when Villa are counter-attacked, their defence can lose its structure and shape very quickly. Darwin Núñez and Mohamed Salah both scored as a result of fast counters (and Darwin should have scored when given a free header from a cross as well, as it happens), while two of Tottenham’s goals came from quick counters through the middle.
While it’s hard to push up and defend space out wide at the same time, it shouldn’t be too simple to get through the centre on the counter, and that’s how three of those goals came about. Compounding the issue is a nasty habit of the defence giving the ball away or clearing straight to a midfielder or forward – Salah and Dominic Solanke’s goals came about that way, as did Matheus Cunha’s goal for Wolverhampton Wanderers earlier in the season.
The good news is that Villa don’t generally play with an especially high line (on average, their defensive line plays 44m from goal, middle of the pack for the Premier League and nearly 10m deeper than that of Manchester City), but they still struggle to stay as compact as most teams aim to be through the centre when attacked that way. Typically, teams more or less conceded the wings to direct passes and counters, knowing that they can get back as a unit and deal with a cross, but Villa are spread out and often seem positionally confused in such situations.
Five of the 17 goals Villa have conceded have come from quick counters or direct passes through the middle – leaving only five which come about in ways other than counters or crosses, including Cunha’s. If the way that Spurs and Liverpool played represents teams cottoning on to Villa’s issues with defending quick attacks through the middle, that could be a serious concern.
As with crosses, this is at least something which is coachable, and certainly Villa can work on their distribution from the back to make sure that they give the ball away in fewer dangerous areas. It’s one thing to have a weakness, another to tee the opposition up to attack it as they did when giving the ball away in front of the centre-halves twice in quick succession, as they did ahead of Solanke’s goal.
Given that four of the five goals that Villa have conceded from fast counters have come in the last few games, it may be that this was an anomaly, of course, but when the same issue crops up several times in quick succession, it suggests a deeper problem, and teams are likely to see if they can’t pick away at that scab in the coming weeks.
Nothing in those games suggested a side that can’t fix their flaws and get back on form. Villa have plenty of quality and a fine coach, and they’re only one point off of the top four despite their recent run of bad results – but they have issues that need addressing, and there are certainly ways in which they can tighten up their defence. With Chelsea improved, Brighton & Hove Albion looking good, Manchester United and Newcastle United lurking and even Nottingham Forest launching themselves into the mixer, the battle for a top four berth could be incredibly close this year. Failing to plaster over a couple of cracks could be the difference between success and failure.