Aston Villa v Nottingham Forest: Top-Flight Build-Up
Preamble
Welcome everyone to this Premier League clash between Villa and Forest. Villa will be the strong favourites to win in this lunchtime start as they are soaring this season and are currently sitting third, 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 beaten 4-1 by top-of-the-table Arsenal and Forest lost 2-0 to Everton.
It will be a difficult task for Forest to come away with all three points with Villa boasting 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 maybe it’s new year, new story? The answer will be revealed very soon.
The starting lineups will be released shortly before kick-off at 12.30pm GMT.
Confirmed Lineups
The lineups have been confirmed. Unai Emery has made four changes to his starting XI who lost 4-1 to Arsenal last time around.
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 changes to their starting squad after a 2-0 defeat to Everton.
Nott’m Forest: Victor, Williams, Murillo, Anderson, Gibbs-White, Dominguez, I Jesus, Hutchinson, Bakwa, Milenkovic, Aina.
Bench: Sels, Morato, Awoniyi, Luiz, Kalimuendo, McAtee, Zinchenko, Savona, Abbott.
Manager Comments
Nottingham Forest manager Sean Dyche has said on his counterpart today:
"Emery has delivered a fantastic job as a manager there. Their transfer business has been impressive - spent a lot of money, to be fair, on some top players and they’ve forged it into a strong side, so definitely a challenging game.
We’ve just demonstrated lately, we’ve taken on some of the top sides, or the ones that are fancied every year, and performed admirably against them - and a couple of teams maybe not as highly-rated, we haven’t done as well against them. That’s probably the challenge of the group - meeting the challenge of each game rather than just the big games."
Squad News
The midfielder has will not be staying at Aston Villa, an update that was revealed 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 top 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 decided two months ago we are not convinced to make the move permanent, committing the money we would need to."
Form Guide
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 shifted, including the manager twice and the current boss is tasked with keeping the club in the top-flight this season. Since being appointed 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 to go.
