Aston Villa v Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Preview
Opening Thoughts
Hello and welcome to this English top-flight encounter between Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. The home side are the strong favourites to win in this lunchtime start as they are excelling this season and are currently occupying third place, while Forest are seventeenth and just a handful of points outside of the relegation zone.
The two teams are entering the game on the back of a defeat as Villa were defeated 4-1 by league-leading Arsenal and Forest lost 2-0 to Everton.
It will be a challenging task for Sean Dyche’s side to obtain all three points with Villa having one of the best home records in Europe at the moment and they also set a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But maybe it’s a new year and a new narrative? All will become clear very soon.
The team news will be released shortly before the start at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The starting XIs have been announced. The Villa boss has made a quartet of alterations to his first eleven who were defeated by 4-1 to Arsenal last time around.
Aston Villa: Martinez, Cash, Konsa, Lindelof, Maatsen, Kamara, Tielemans, McGinn, Buendia, Rogers, Watkins.
Bench: Bizot, Digne, Sancho, Garcia, Carroll, Bogarde, Hemmings, Malen, Jimoh-Aloba.
Nottingham Forest have also made four changes to their starting squad after a 2-0 defeat to Everton.
Nottingham Forest: Victor, Williams, Murillo, Anderson, Gibbs-White, Dominguez, I Jesus, Hutchinson, Bakwa, Milenkovic, Aina.
Bench: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Dugout Insights
Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche has said on his opponent today:
"He has done a excellent job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been good - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some top players and they’ve shaped it into a cohesive team, so definitely a challenging game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve taken on some of the bigger teams, or the ones that are fancied every year, and performed admirably against them - and a couple of teams perhaps not as fancied, we struggled more against them. That’s probably the challenge of the group - meeting the expectation of each game rather than just the big games."
Squad News
Harvey Elliott has no future at Aston Villa, news that was revealed by the manager Unai Emery in the lead-up to this match. The boss stated:
"I am respecting him as much as possible because he’s a excellent professional, very respectful. The problem we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is playing matches, we are obligated to buy him. We decided two months ago we are not persuaded to make the move permanent, spending the money we would need to."
League Context
What a difference a year makes. This time last year Nottingham Forest were third in the table, where Villa are now. A lot of things have altered, including the manager on two occasions and Sean Dyche is tasked with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being appointed on 21 October, Dyche has accumulated 10 Premier League points and the side are just outside the bottom three with 19 games of the season remaining.
