Matt Maher analysis: Villa’s best season in years book-ended by big defeats
A match between a team who did not want the season to end and another whose already had pretty much turned out the way you imagined.
Crystal Palace 5 Villa 0 was, from the latter’s perspective, mercifully no more than a scruffy footnote to an epic, the 56th and comfortably most meaningless match of a campaign in which Unai Emery’s team overcame the odds and hit heights few thought possible.
No-one likes losing, not least in this manner. This 10th league defeat of the season, courtesy of Jean-Philippe Mateta’s hat-trick and a double from Eberichi Eze, was Villa’s heaviest in the Premier League for more than four years and bookended a season which began with them conceding five at Newcastle.
And yet just like that result, it will be quickly forgotten in the minds of most, thanks to everything which has happened in between.
If nothing else, this experience will have reinforced for Emery what Villa must do next. Their most important meeting of the week did not take place at Selhurst Park but Bodymoor Heath, where Emery will sit down with owners Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens to thrash out plans for a summer where the club must first negotiate profit and sustainability rules but also strengthen if they are to stand any chance of continuing upward momentum.
Their current squad, stretched to the limits in recent weeks, was at its barest here as players who had played through the pain barrier in recent weeks in the successful pursuit of a top four finish took a rest. Emery even had to name his son Lander, a goalkeeper with the club’s academy with no professional appearances to his name, on the bench which contained only eight substitutes. The head coach’s reluctance to blood young players from the start here, meanwhile, backs up the sense he does not, right now, view them as a solution.
Lack of resources, admittedly, cannot excuse some of Villa’s defending. Yet the bigger picture and the release of Champions League football having already secured, coupled with the fact of facing one of the league’s most in-form teams, makes the outcome that bit more understandable.
