It’s getting serious now, and Nottingham Forest are in the way.
You could debate from now until kick-off how long it’s been since we had a match as important as Thursday night’s European adventure. Given that all focal points hark back to 1982, you can ask what’s been bigger since then. We’ve had cup finals and a couple of years ago there was a European semi, but that was a bit of a sideshow to the main business and these days even finals aren’t massively important in the long-term.
This one, though, is a bit different. Not only is the Villa’s strategy built around regularly qualifying for the Champions League, but there’s the nagging suspicion that if we don’t do it this time we never will. Which means that this match might be our most important in 44 years.
It’s not the most arduous journey we’ve ever made in Europe, and we know the way well enough. Forest were out of the Premier League for a long, long time but they’ve managed to stay and they’ll be here for another season thanks to a run of form that’s come at exactly the wrong time. It isn’t that long ago we played there and the players, manager, owner and stewards will all be the same, unless the stewards are working nights and they’ve got somebody taking their place.
We’ve got much the same team barring unforeseen accident/injury/epidemic. There’s no room here for the obvious lines about passports, getting the plane and foreigners talking funny although I do wonder about one thing – do the team have to be there the night before and will they be training on the pitch?
Everything’s set fair for a hard-fought match but there’s one advantage we do have- we’ve got Unai. And for possibly the first time ever on a big European night we’ve got the more experienced players. If there’s any justice we won’t just kill off the tie on Thursday night, we’ll bury it and do a post mortem. Then again, a draw won’t be a bad result and in a week’s time we can have another most important match since 1982.
