Aston Villa boss Unai Emery blasts players and accepts blame after Monaco defeat

The Villa boss fears his team blew their chance to finish in the top-eight of the competition’s league phase and also accepted his share of the blame, claiming he made a mistake by pairing Jhon Duran and Ollie Watkins together up front.

Duran was brought off the bench early in the second half as Villa looked for a leveller following Wilfried Singo's eighth-minute opener but Villa’s performance fizzled out and an emotional Emery said: “I made a mistake when I decided to play with two strikers because in that moment we were more or less controlling the game.”

In an unusually withering blast, the Villa boss also claimed some players were failing to follow his plan. 

He said: “We are in this direction, being very demanding with the players we have but someone (some of them) are not following the plan we are doing and this is the objective I have now, to try to build the team as strong as possible with the mentality we’re building. 

“I’m very happy with a lot of players, especially Emiliano Buendia because he had the option to leave but today we needed him and he played fantastically, with his qualities, with his mentality and commitment.”

Asked what he meant by players not following the plan, Emery tapped the side of his head twice and said: “We want it and we need it.”

In addition to Buendia, Emery also referenced Boubacar Kamara, Youri Tielemans, Ezri Konsa, Matty Cash, Emi Martinez and Tyrone Mings as having “played doing everything we were planning” while explaining Morgan Rogers had been feeling ill.

Defeat means Villa will have to beat Celtic in next week’s final group stage match and likely get help from elsewhere to finish in the top-eight and avoid next month’s play-off round.

But Emery fears they may have left themselves too much to do. The boss had described the game in Monaco as a huge opportunity but in front of a watching Prince William they failed to grasp it with Emery also taking aim at the quality of his team’s set-pieces.

“We were horrible today in set -pieces, we had seven corners and we didn’t have one good corner to try to score,” he said. 

“When we are playing in matches like today, for a very important three points, because I think we lost the opportunity to be in the top eight. Today was the key to get it. 

“The last 20, 25 minutes when we were playing with two strikers, we lost it a bit, our own positioning. We were not threatening like in the first 70 minutes.”

Emery felt the loss of shape following Duran’s introduction was a bigger factor in his team’s poor finish to the game, rather than tiredness in what was Villa’s third match in six days.

“The last 20 minutes we lost a little bit our position on the field,” he said. “It is not because the players were tired, it is because I decided to play with two strikers.

“With some two strikers we are not being organised with our positioning like I want. We didn’t work well tactically those 20 minutes rather than being tired.”