Unravelling Forest's Europa League Exit

A depleted Forest side were comfortably beaten by Aston Villa, with 2 late goals coming after Vitor Pereira made changes to try and chase the game.

A 1-0 lead from the first leg turned out to be nowhere near enough for a Forest side missing key players. They were beaten by a far superior team on the night, who caused some familiar problems that Forest saw only a few weeks ago in the Premier League.

In the Premier League game in April, Villa’s narrow wingers caused Forest all sorts of problems.

Throughout that game, Villa’s attacking midfielders would continue to pick up spaces between Forest’s lines. With a vastly changed lineup, they’d find it even easier to do this on Thursday night.

Large Spaces In The Midfield

Throughout the first half, Jair Cunha stayed very close to Nikola Milenkovic to try and support him against the threat of Ollie Watkins. This gave Emi Buendia lots of space to drop in to pockets in central areas.

It looks like Pereira tasked Omari Hutchinson with trying to keep tabs on Buendia, but it’s an unusual task for him and with Jair Cunha being so narrow, he also has to be alive to the threat of Lucas Digne moving forward near the touchline.

When you also add in an early inability from Forest to pass players off to each other (here Anderson needs to be filling in this gap in the middle), then it just allowed Villa to find these kinds of spaces all too easily.