Sancho & Cash: the Aston Villa odd couple showing Unai Emery the way forward

Aston Villa were beaten 2-0 by Wolverhampton Wanderers on Friday night in what many supporters saw as an avoidable embarrassment.

Villa don’t win at Molineux. In that sense, the result wasn’t a surprise even against a Wolves team well adrift at the bottom of the Premier League table. Wolves are a slightly different proposition under Rob Edwards but this result was about Villa.

It was a dismal night in every respect and manager Unai Emery has to wear it. He’s responsible for Villa starting the weekend in third place so there’ll be no over-the-top reaction here, but Friday’s tame capitulation was every flavour of wrong from start to finish.

Villa’s failings were costly, but not total

There are long-standing question marks over Villa’s style of play. The tempo has been definite, deliberate and damaging, and its theoretical success up to this point doesn’t make that not true.

The more immediate scrutiny also encompasses Emery’s team selection and substitutions, which both fell short against Wolves.

Villa are very evidently suffering without Boubacar Kamara, Youri Tielemans and John McGinn, but there were players on the pitch who shouldn’t have been there when Wolves scored their first goal and others who weren’t there but should have been.

To pick the bones out of the tactical plan and scrutinise Emery’s personnel decisions isn’t to let his players off the hook for a wholly unacceptable performance, but picking Ollie Watkins over Tammy Abraham and Lucas Digne over Ian Maatsen was a mistake.

One of Emery’s three changes for the game against Wolves was more effective. Jadon Sancho came into the team on the right side of the attack and was, I thought, Villa’s most dangerous attacking threat.

A promising partnership on the right wing

Yet Sancho was substituted after an hour and replaced by Leon Bailey. Villa conceding the first goal immediately wasn’t a direct consequence of that change but it emphasised the difference between the before and the after.

If there’s a positive to be found anywhere in this shambles, any hope hidden away deep in a growing morass of pedestrian football, Sancho is one of the components of it. The other is Matty Cash.

Neither Sancho nor Cash played out of their skins at Wolves and both have had better games even recently, but the way they interacted was just about the only cause for optimism in an otherwise atrocious performance.

Having failed to take their early chances, Villa’s likeliest route to goal was through the link play of their right-sided pairing. They managed to get into attacking and crossing positions behind the Wolves defence, an area where Villa are allowed to go often but don’t really seem to have a plan once they get there.

When Villa signed Sancho and Harvey Elliott on loan on transfer deadline day, my expectation was that Sancho would eventually be combined with former Borussia Dortmund teammate Maatsen on the left – a partnership that has also looked good, in flashes – with Elliott establishing himself on the other side of Morgan Rogers.

Sancho and Cash offer a fix

It’s safe to say it hasn’t worked out that way for either of them.

Emery was clearly unhappy with him in possession to an extent on Friday night but Sancho’s work off the ball has earned the manager’s trust and his growing influence on the right has dovetailed with the timing of Emi Buendía‘s resurgence on the left.

Cash is still having his best season in a Villa shirt by miles. He’s more confident than ever going forward, more robust and steady defensively, and has been among Villa’s most consistent performers. In quickly carving out a pairing with Sancho, Cash has helped to create one potentially fertile option in a barren spell for Villa.

Splitting them up when they were working well after just an hour wasn’t what I’d have done, but then I wouldn’t have taken Douglas Luiz off at the same time either.

But Molineux is in the past. Nobody of a Villa persuasion came out of it looking good and nobody deserved to. Mistakes were made and failings on and off the pitch were obvious, but if Emery is to push Villa on from this point, he could do worse than leaning on two of his most in-form players as a primary mode of attack.

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