Aston Villa against Nottingham Forest: Premier League Preview
Introduction
Greetings and welcome to this Premier League encounter between Villa and Nottingham Forest. Villa will be the favourites to win in this early kick-off as they are excelling this season and are currently sitting third, while Nottingham Forest are seventeenth and just four points outside of the drop zone.
Each side are entering the game on the back of a loss as Villa were defeated 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest fell 2-0 to Everton.
This promises to be a difficult task for Forest to come away with all three points with Villa having one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also recorded a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But perhaps it’s a new year and a new narrative? The answer will be revealed very soon.
The starting lineups will be announced shortly before the start at 12.30pm GMT.
Team News
The lineups have been confirmed. Unai Emery has made a quartet of alterations to his starting lineup who were defeated by 4-1 to Arsenal last time out.
Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Bench: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Forest have likewise made four changes 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.
Substitutes: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Dugout Insights
Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche has said on his opponent today:
"Emery has delivered a fantastic job as a manager there. Their recruitment has been impressive - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some excellent players and they’ve shaped it into a good unit, so definitely a difficult game.
We’ve just shown lately, we’ve faced some of the bigger teams, or the ones that are fancied every year, and done very well against them - and a couple of teams maybe not as fancied, we haven’t done as well against them. That’s probably the test of the group - rising to the challenge of each game rather than just the big games."
Player Situation
The midfielder has no future at Aston Villa, an update that was confirmed by the manager Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss said:
"We respect him as much as possible because he’s a very good professional, very dedicated. The situation we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is featuring regularly, we are obligated to buy him. We decided two months ago we are not persuaded to sign him, spending the money we would need to."
Form Guide
How times change. This time last year Forest were third in the table, where Aston Villa are now. A lot of things have changed, including the manager twice and Sean Dyche is tasked with keeping the club in the Premier League this season. Since being appointed on 21 October, Dyche has won 10 Premier League points and the side are just outside the bottom three with 19 games of the season remaining.
