Unai Emery met the media on Wednesday afternoon to preview the next stage of Aston Villa’s Europa Conference League adventure.
LOSC Lille are the club’s opponents in the quarter-finals and our head coach was quizzed by journalists ahead of facing the Ligue 1 side.
Here’s what he had to say…
On team news…
“The injured players we have are Tyrone Mings and Emi Buendia. They are progressing well, starting to be on the field. Kamara as well and Jacob Ramsey are out for the rest of the season.
“The last player who has some problems and is unavailable for tomorrow is Cash, who is working alone and he’s close to start practicing with us.
“Lenglet has a small problem but is not available for tomorrow.”
On the team’s busy schedule…
“We are having experiences and that is most important, being competitive and trying to be successful.
“We are excited and we wanted to get the opportunity we have in front of us in the quarter-final of the Conference League.
“For us, it’s very important to try to focus on this way because everything we did before was getting us to the quarter-final and trying to enjoy the moment we have.”
On spreading goals around the squad…
“My objective is always to help and support every player. The responsibility to score is not only for the strikers.
“Of course, it’s the first responsibility we have to get good players in the squad scoring goals and trying to support them to get chances to score goals, like with Ollie Watkins.
“I want wingers, midfielders, centre-backs to score as well because set pieces are very important to get chances to score. To share in the squad different positions of the players scoring goals is very important.
“We have a very great scorer with Ollie Watkins and we’re very happy.”
On facing Lille…
“Firstly, we must always respect the competition. Europe is difficult and it’s good to have experiences like we are having in this competition because sometimes we are going through some tough moments, like when we lost the first match against Legia Warszawa away and when we won against Zrinjski in the last minute.
“We played two legs against Ajax and it was a very good experience for us. We drew there and we didn’t deserve more and at home we played being consistent with personality, seriously and we won.
“Lille is the same. Respect the competition and respect the opponent. They have experiences in Europe, Lille as a team. I know their president is very competitive and an experienced man in Europe.
“They are focusing on this competition and this quarter-final, not playing between two matches against us in the French league. They have good players with good experiences in Europe.
“They have a good coach, Fonseca, an experienced coach. They have very good players, individually. They are a very competitive team with a very good coach.”
