Journalists from national and local media picked Steven Gerrard’s brains ahead of this weekend’s Premier League game against Leicester City.
Speaking via virtual press conference on Friday afternoon, the Aston Villa head coach had plenty of topics to discuss.
Here’s what he had to say…
On team news…
“Unfortunately, Leon Bailey has had a scan and that’s confirmed that it’s a muscle injury in that quad area. It’s going to be quite a long one.
“He’ll be missing for a number of weeks. It’s difficult to put a date on that right now, but we won’t see him before Christmas.
“Danny Ings is one that we’re working closely with and we’ll give him every chance before making a decision on him tomorrow.”
On Brendan Rodgers…
“Brendan is a top coach. The biggest thing was his delivery on the training pitch, you could see quite clearly he had a lot of experience.
“He was a good manager to play for, in terms of our personal relationship. It would have been very naive from my point of view not to learn from him as much as I could.
“I’ve continued to do that, even when we’ve not been working together because I’ve been competing against him up in Scotland and seeing him do so well in the Premier League.
“He’s one of many managers that I watch closely. In my position, when you’re new and you’re starting out, they’re the type of people that you do try and learn from.”
On his first few weeks in the job….
“It’s fantastic to be back [in the Premier League]. It’s a real privilege and honour to sit in this position, to be the head coach of such a huge club.
“It took me a few days, maybe a week, to process the whole change in the situation because it did happen at a speed.
“Now, three weeks into the job, having met new people, having seen where the team’s at and what we can potentially do moving forward, I’m even more excited than I was when I took the role.”
On playing Leicester City…
“You’ve got to be respectful of the challenge. Brendan’s done a really strong job at Leicester and we know that they’ve got very dangerous players.
“We know we’re going to have to control the front four or five, depending on how they set-up. We need to keep their main threats as quiet as possible.
“That’s going to take hard work, organisation and people really rolling up their sleeves to defend our goal.
“We know we’ve got talent and we know that we’ve got quality in our team to hurt any team. We’ve proved that in the opening weeks, they proved that before I came in the door.
“We’ll strive to keep a clean sheet, knowing that we’ve got players that can hurt Leicester.”
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Aston Villa v Leicester City
