Unai Emery happy to embrace the pressure as Aston Villa prepare for another pivotal match
Unai Emery is happy to keep piling the pressure on Villa’s players heading into Tuesday’s Champions League “six-pointer” at Manchester City.
Villa go to the Etihad, where they have lost their last 14 Premier League visits, sat just one point behind the reigning champions in the battle for a top-five finish.
City boss Pep Guardiola branded the clash a “final” for his side and Emery also made no attempt to play down its importance.
The Villa manager described last Saturday’s visit of Newcastle as the “most important and difficult” match of the season and then watched his team blow away the Magpies 4-1 to record a fifth straight league win.
And while the stakes will again be high against City, Emery believes it can bring the best out of his men.
He said: “An objective I have here as a coach with the players, is to try to play matches feeling a little bit of pressure.
“But feeling it like something positive. To play under pressure is to play needing to win, needing to perform in our best level.
“This pressure I learned, with my experiences, to dominate it, to manage it.
"Now my objective with the players, individually and collectively as well, everybody, is to try to dominate and to manage to play under the pressure to win.
“In the process we are in, the last matches playing in the Premier League and ‘we must win’ is the message, I want to send this message clearly and explaining why I want to play under pressure and try to get our best.
“We want to feel something positive, feel something adding to us, getting better as a team. Tomorrow is clearly one of those matches.”
The home side, who will miss out on the title for the first time since 2020, sit fourth in the table but are only a point ahead of the seventh-placed visitors.
Speaking earlier on Monday, Guardiola called on home supporters to bring the noise from the first minute.
He said: “It’s a final for us. Every point, every game counts.
“But, you know, they are a contender to qualify for the Champions League, and you saw both games they played against my friend Luis Enrique and his PSG team? Wow. I was really, really impressed.”
Emery said: “Saturday was a key moment, playing against a team playing as a contender in front of us.
“After the victory, we are in this run. Tomorrow with Man City it is something similar. They are one point in front of us. After tomorrow we play 12 points more.
“I am focusing on this match with it being one of the most difficult matches of the year, tomorrow is one of them. The most important match we are going to play is tomorrow.
“We must compete in the best level we have. We must compete with the players we have and there are no excuses playing after Saturday and playing before the semi-final on Saturday. The focus is only on tomorrow.
“At 9:45pm, we will know better our possibility to achieve through the Premier League our objective to get into the Champions League.”
