Champions League Round of 16 Notes (First Leg)

Some thoughts on the Round of 16 First Leg matches

Club Brugge vs. Aston Villa

Club Brugge in Possession vs. Aston Villa out of Possession

Club Brugge may have scored three goals and knocked Atalanta out of the Champions League, but if we are being honest, they were pretty fortunate to do so.

image via FotMob

These two met in Matchday four of the Champions League with Club Brugge walking away with a 1-0 win on a bizarre penalty mishap when Aston Villa was trying to take a goal kick.

In the end, Club Brugge outside of the penalty did not create much against Aston Villa in that match. They took 12 shots for 0.58 non-penalty expected goals and were mainly trying to build through the wide areas without a lot of success.

However, there were a couple instances like the one below where they were able to overload Aston Villa out wide and create a decent chance.

That is what you are going to see a lot of against Aston Villa who plays very compact with their usual high defensive line.

We’ve been seeing more and more against weaker opposition though of Unai Emery asking his team to press higher up the pitch. They did that to Brugge in the previous meeting and made them play more direct. In their last Premier League match against Crystal Palace, Aston Villa had a PPDA of 6.0 and forced 21 danger zone losses despite getting blown out and against Chelsea they forced 33 danger zone losses.

Aston Villa in Possession vs. Club Brugge out of Possession

If you’ve watched Aston Villa this season, you’ll know they are not a team that wants to play direct. They will do it if they are playing tougher opposition, but in general, Unai Emery wants his team to build out from the back.

Club Brugge in the previous meeting was basically daring Aston Villa to play balls in behind by sitting in a midblock for most of the match. They even would resort to going to a back six like the situation below to avoid Aston Villa getting a 5 v 5 or 5 v4 advantage on the last line.

What Aston Villa did to try and combat this was to drop Morgan Rogers and others deep to try and pull Club Brugge’s back line out of position to create space for Watkins to make runs in behind. What ended up happening though is Villa was able to freely receive the ball inbetween the lines, but were able to do nothing with it.

image via markstatsbot on X

In the end, Aston Villa created 0.4 expected goals off of eight shots and seven of those came from outside the box. Emery has got to have a better tactical plan this time around to exploit that space in behind of Brugge’s midblock.