Aston Villa vs Nottingham Forest: A Crucial Test for Emery's Side

Aston Villa, still glowing from their Champions League win over Club Brugge, walk back into Villa Park on Saturday with something far more awkward hanging over them: the prospect of making the wrong kind of English football history.

Four days after Brugge, it’s Nottingham Forest. Different competition, same pressure. Villa are trying to prove that last season’s strange, stuttering start was a one-off – not a new habit.

Villa’s search for a spark

The parallels are uncomfortable. Last year, they didn’t find a league goal until their fifth game, only to pinch a gritty European win that lit the fuse on a stunning run of 17 victories in 19 matches. A season that had looked doomed suddenly roared into life.

This time, the story is slightly different. Brighton shredded them on the opening day. That was a mess. Since then, though, Unai Emery’s side have at least looked like a team with a plan rather than a group feeling their way in the dark.

Emery has tightened the defensive structure quickly, shoring up the soft centre that cost them early in the previous campaign. The attacking play, slow to warm through August, finally crackled against Brugge. The patterns were sharper, the movement braver, the confidence visible again in the final third.

And there is more to come. Ibrahim Mbaye, a marquee summer signing, and Johan Manzambi, fresh from being named Ballon d'Or Young Talent of the Year nominee, are still waiting for their first Premier League minutes in claret and blue. Both could step onto the Villa Park pitch for the first time in league colours on Saturday.

Their impact may be needed immediately. Villa are one bad afternoon away from becoming the first team in English league history to start consecutive seasons without a goal in their opening four matches. For a club with ambitions of establishing itself among the elite, that statistic would sting.

History, though, offers comfort. Villa have won six Premier League home games in a row against Forest. The last time the sides met, Emery’s men ripped Forest apart 4-0 to book a place in the Europa League final, a night when Villa Park felt like a club on the rise and Forest looked miles off the pace.

Yet that memory is already fading. Six of the starting XI from that evening have gone. Nine of the 16 players used are no longer at the club. The core of that team has been stripped out and rebuilt. The badge is the same; the dressing room is not. This is a new Villa trying to write its own story.

Glasner’s grip on Emery

Across the technical area, Oliver Glasner arrives with problems of his own. Forest are winless from their first three league games, and they have not beaten Aston Villa away from home since 1994. On paper, this is not the place you come to reset a season.

Glasner may see it very differently.

For Emery and Villa, the Austrian has become a recurring nightmare. Across seven meetings, all during Glasner’s time at Crystal Palace, he never lost to Emery. The aggregate scoreline is brutal: 19-4 in Glasner’s favour.

Two of those wins came at Villa Park, a ground that had turned into a fortress under Emery. Across a 41-match home run in all competitions, Villa were beaten only twice. Both defeats came at the hands of Glasner.

Those numbers cut both ways. For Glasner, this is one of the most dominant head-to-head records of his managerial career. He has only once put together a longer unbeaten run against a single manager, and he has never enjoyed a better record against a counterpart without tasting defeat.

For Emery, it is an unwanted landmark: the longest winless stretch he has endured against any manager.

So Saturday offers more than just three points. It is a test of whether Villa’s new identity can withstand an old problem, and whether Forest’s new era under Glasner can finally turn encouraging theory into hard results.

Villa Park has seen this fixture tilt their way for three decades. Glasner has seen it tilt his way every time he has faced Emery. One of those patterns has to give.