Villa v Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Build-Up
Introduction
Greetings and welcome to this Premier League fixture between Aston Villa and Forest. Aston Villa are the strong favourites to win in this early kick-off as they are flying this season and are currently sitting third, while Forest are 17th and just four points outside of the drop zone.
Each side are entering the game following a defeat as Villa were beaten 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest fell 2-0 to Everton.
This promises to be a challenging task for Sean Dyche’s side to secure all three points with Villa boasting 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 new year, new story? All will become clear very soon.
The team news will be released shortly before the start at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The team news is in. Unai Emery has made a quartet of alterations to his starting lineup who lost 4-1 to Arsenal last time out.
Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Substitutes: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Forest have also made four adjustments to their matchday squad after a 2-0 loss to Everton.
Nottingham 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
Forest boss Sean Dyche has said on his counterpart today:
"He’s [Unai Emery] done a great job as a manager there. Their recruitment has been good - spent a lot of money, to be fair, on some excellent players and they’ve forged it into a strong side, so certainly a difficult game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve played against some of the bigger teams, or the ones that are fancied every year, and done very well against them - and a couple of teams perhaps not as highly-rated, we struggled more against them. That’s likely the challenge of the group - meeting the challenge of each game rather than just the major fixtures."
Player Situation
The midfielder has no future at Aston Villa, news that was revealed by the manager Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss commented:
"We respect him as much as possible because he’s a excellent professional, very dedicated. 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 decided two months ago we are not persuaded to make the move permanent, committing the money we need."
Season Snapshot
How times change. This time last year Forest were in third place in the table, where Villa are now. A lot of things have changed, including the manager on two occasions and the current boss is tasked with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being named manager 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 remaining.
