Aston Villa versus Nottingham Forest: Premier League Match Preview
Preamble
Hello and welcome to this English top-flight fixture between Villa and Nottingham Forest. The home side are the favourites to win in this early kick-off as they are excelling this season and are currently occupying third place, while Nottingham Forest are in 17th position and just a handful of points outside of the drop zone.
Each side are coming into the game off of 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 Sean Dyche’s side to obtain all three points with Villa possessing one of the best home forms in Europe at the moment and they also set a team record of 36 wins across all competitions this season. But perhaps it’s new year, new story? We will find out very soon.
The starting lineups will be released shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Team News
The starting XIs have been announced. The Villa boss has made four changes to his starting lineup 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 likewise made four adjustments to their starting 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.
Pre-Match Quotes
Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche has commented on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a great job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been impressive - invested a lot of money, to be fair, on some excellent players and they’ve forged it into a good unit, so definitely a challenging game.
We’ve just shown lately, we’ve played against some of the top sides, 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 haven't performed as strongly against them. That’s likely the challenge of the group - meeting the expectation of each game rather than just the big games."
Player Situation
Harvey Elliott has will not be staying at Aston Villa, an update that was stated by the manager Emery in the build-up to this match. The boss stated:
"I am respecting him all we can because he’s a very good professional, very respectful. The issue we have with Harvey is this year he is a loan player and if he is featuring regularly, we must buy him. We made the decision two months ago we are not persuaded to sign him, committing the money we need."
League Context
How times change. This time last year Nottingham Forest were in third place in the table, where 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 named manager on 21 October, Dyche has secured 10 Premier League points and the side are just above the bottom three with 19 games of the season remaining.