Aston Villa continue to surpass expectations as they bounced back from defeat by Arsenal to cement their place in the top three with an 11th straight home win. Ollie Watkins celebrated his 250th appearance for the club with his fourth goal in three games and John McGinn added two more after the interval.
Villa’s ability to score out of next to nothing epitomises their season. They managed this game superbly, inflicting a fourth straight defeat on Nottingham Forest, but if the league table was made up of their expected goals difference they would have started this weekend in 15th place.
Instead they overtook Manchester City, who play Chelsea on Sunday, to briefly move within three points of the top before Arsenal stretched the gap back to six with victory at Bournemouth on Saturday evening.
Few would have suspected Villa had lost their previous game 4-1 at Arsenal as they set about swatting Forest aside. These are troubling times for Sean Dyche’s side, for whom Morgan Gibbs-White had given them hope when making it 2-1 but who are making “too many basic errors” according to their manager.
To think that at this time last year Forest kept five clean sheets in a run of seven successive wins, their best sequence in the Premier League. Now it is hard to discern what Dyche’s Plan B is when they go behind, although their faltering form started when they slipped out of Champions League contention at the end of last season and Ange Postecoglu soon followed Nuno Espírito Santo out the building in the autumn.
“You can’t give basic errors away to teams like this in the Premier League,” Dyche said. “The mentality is there but you can’t keep giving yourself a mountain to climb. Players were switching off to the basics. We have worked on it and shown them but this is the job. I never expected it to be easy when I got here.”
Part of Villa’s formula for success is to keep scoring belters from outside the area, and Watkins’s seventh of the season was the latest. Those who see their claret and blue glass as half empty might question whether this is sustainable but Unai Emery can point to the quality of the moves, the dominance that precedes some of the long-range strikes and the flourishing understanding between Watkins and Morgan Rogers.
John Victor, retaining his place from Matz Sels, saved superbly from Watkins in the second minute but was culpable for McGinn’s clinching goal.
Forest did counter well occasionally, Omari Hutchinson prompting Emi Martínez to dive full length to save after Nicolás Domínguez stole possession from Boubacar Kamara then Victor Lindelöf.
Just as Forest thought they had implemented the perfect gameplan, Villa went ahead. Kamara’s header down to Tielemans allowed Rogers to pass in to Watkins’s feet. He turned inside before walloping in his sixth goal in eight games from the edge of the area.
No pair have combined for more than the 10 goals between Villa’s England forwards since the start of last season. “Wow,” Emery said. “Morgan and Watkins are both fantastic players. They are fantastic competitors themselves. They are both focusing on improving things and their commitment here is massive. They set standards with their behaviour every day. I am proud of them.”
Watkins’s goal knocked the stuffing out of Forest. Four minutes into the second half McGinn, rested from the starting lineup on Tuesday, converted with a smart left-foot shot from Matty Cash’s first-time cross.
Gibbs-White gave Forest hope by running on to Dilane Bakwa’s through pass to dink home but the victory was wrapped up when John Victor inexplicably came out of his goal to deal with Tielemans’s pass and McGinn rounded him before slotting into an empty net from 30 yards.
Emery played down Villa’s title credentials. “Our challenge is the next match, not how we will finish,” he said. “Our target is to be in Europe. We need players to feel comfortable and feel confidence, being demanding.”
