Every Villan out there knows that it was a difficult summer for the club, and our preparations for the 2025/26 campaign were seriously disrupted as we missed out on the Champions League on goal difference and then had to juggle Financial Fair Play rules. The dressing room spirit was affected, and naturally, our start to the season followed suit. Five league games without a win were compounded by dropping out of the League Cup, and some fans began to get wobbly, wondering if Unai Emery had lost his magic.

He had not, and our remarkable rise following his arrival at Villa Park slowly began to steady again. Even so, our trip to the Emirates Stadium ended in a disappointing 4–1 defeat. In truth, the disappointment had been building, and while some supporters spent the aftermath revisiting performances and analysing what went wrong, others drifted toward wider online distractions — from general football discussion to an overview of BetMGM and similar platforms.

Our joint-record eleven-match winning streak was never going to last forever. Having already exchanged handshakes with Mikel Arteta earlier in the month, the return fixture always felt like the moment that run might finally come to an end.

A strangely still out of form – despite recent improvements – Ollie Watkins led the line and was joined by Jadon Sancho and Emi ‘The Impact Sub’ Buendia, with Lamare Bogarde and Victor Lindelof joining Emi ‘No Corners Please’ Martinez at the back. A much-changed side, missing key players, remained well in the game until we lost Amadou Onana’s strength in midfield at the halftime break, and then it all went wrong.

So we quickly dust ourselves down and move on. We have already established a six-point buffer over Liverpool as we comfortably occupy third place in the table, and even after the defeat, and a fair bit of pie-in-the-sky media posturing about being in the title race, the loss still sees us only six points from top spot, so it is all still very much to play for.

As we continue our preparations to do just that as we open up the second half of the campaign and the year of 2026 with Saturday’s midday clash with Nottingham Forest, whatever way you reflect on the last few months, the only takeaway from it is that we have had a phenomenal opening half of the season.

Emery’s arrival has seen remarkable sustained improvement in our play and the results that we have picked up, and although we have largely flown under the radar as one of the top four or five performing sides in the division over the last few years, nobody back in August could have predicted the incredible winning streak we have just been on. Certainly, no one in the fanbase would even have had a first thought, let alone a second thought, about the faithful celebrating Christmas and looking forward to the New Year with the knowledge that 12 wins on the spin would have meant that we entered 2026 joint level on points in top spot.

Okay, it was not to be, and that is not surprising given the summer that we have had, the serious lack of business we were able to compete to really strengthen the group, and the glaringly obvious weaknesses we still have when it comes to options on the substitutes bench and our overall squad depth.

But there is still so much on offer for us this year if our improved mental strength and the almost never say die attitude the players now seem to have developed continue, and that is exactly what we should be focused on as we continue to fight for even more improvement in the coming months. Few would deny that pushing it this close and securing third spot in the league and a return of Champions League football would be a fabulous response to our summer struggles, and financially it would very much be a welcome boost to our Profit and Sustainability and Squad Cost Ratio issues as well, and that will undoubtedly be our aim now for the next few months as Unai continues his own determined drive for further improvement.

For now, though, it is all about how we again react to a defeat, and everyone will be looking for us to immediately bounce back, and we should more than be able to do that against Evangelos Marinakis’s struggling Nottingham Forest side. After last season’s run and hype, it has all gone a little bit wrong at The City Stadium, and after the early-season managerial merry-go-round, third choice Sean Dyche now has them perched in 17th place, just four points clear of the drop zone.