Aston Villa versus Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Build-Up
Introduction
Greetings and welcome to this English top-flight encounter between Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. Villa will be the strong favourites to win in this early kick-off as they are excelling this season and are currently occupying third place, while Nottingham Forest are 17th and just a handful of points outside of the relegation zone.
Both clubs are entering the game off of the back of a setback as Villa were beaten 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest fell 2-0 to Everton.
This promises to be a difficult task for Forest to obtain all three points with Villa having one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also achieved a club record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But perhaps it’s a new year and a new narrative? All will become clear very soon.
The starting lineups will be released shortly before the start at 12.30pm GMT.
Starting Elevens
The starting XIs have been announced. The Villa boss has made four changes to his starting XI who were defeated by 4-1 to Arsenal in their previous match.
Aston Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Substitutes: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Nottingham Forest have likewise made four adjustments to their matchday squad after a 2-0 loss to Everton.
Nott’m Forest: Victor, Williams, Murillo, Anderson, Gibbs-White, Dominguez, I Jesus, Hutchinson, Bakwa, Milenkovic, Aina.
Bench: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Manager Comments
Forest boss Sean Dyche has remarked on his counterpart today:
"He’s [Unai Emery] done a excellent job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been impressive - spent a lot of money, to be fair, on some very good players and they’ve forged it into a cohesive team, so certainly a tough game.
We’ve just shown lately, we’ve faced some of the larger clubs, or the ones that are fancied 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 likely the challenge of the group - rising to the challenge of each game rather than just the big games."
Squad News
The midfielder has will not be staying at Aston Villa, an update that was confirmed by the manager Unai Emery in the lead-up to this match. The boss said:
"I am respecting him all we can because he’s a excellent professional, very dedicated. The situation we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is playing matches, we must buy him. We decided two months ago we are not convinced to make the move permanent, spending the money we would need to."
Form Guide
How times change. This time last year Forest were in third place in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have altered, including the manager on two occasions and Sean Dyche is charged with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being named manager on 21 October, Dyche has accumulated 10 Premier League points and the side are just above the bottom three with 19 games of the season to go.