Unai Emery faces a selection headache after Birmingham Live reported yesterday that Pau Torres could spend up to four weeks recovering from a hamstring injury. The Spanish centre-back went off during the weekend defeat by Nottingham Forest, leaving his manager searching for solutions at the back ahead of a demanding run of fixtures.
Torres and Ian Maatsen are both expected to sit out the coming matches against Coventry City and Tottenham Hotspur. However, the subsequent international window should limit the total number of games they miss, with a potential return targeted for the Brentford fixture afterwards.
The timing is far from ideal given how heavily Villa rely on their number 14 to dictate tempo. According to figures cited by Birmingham Live, the team generated 0.64 of their 0.82 expected goals during the opening 25 minutes against Forest while Torres remained on the pitch. He completed 23 of his 26 attempted passes before departing, and once he left, Forest created the bulk of their chances, accumulating 2.08 of their 2.28 xG without him.
Retaining possession also became noticeably harder. Maatsen lost the ball 15 times without the Spaniard offering cover behind him, while John McGinn and Boubacar Kamara surrendered it 13 and 10 times respectively. That drop-off underlines why controlling matches through defensive distribution remains such a priority for Emery.
Finding a like-for-like replacement is difficult. Victor Lindelof performed well on the left side of the back line last term alongside Ezri Konsa, but the latter has since joined Arsenal. Youri Tielemans, another player who previously helped circulate the ball from deep, is also no longer at the club.
That leaves Taylor Harwood-Bellis as the most obvious internal candidate to step in. Yet the 24-year-old appears to be outside Emery's immediate plans, having been left out of the most recent Premier League selections and omitted entirely from the Champions League league-phase roster. Whether that changes out of necessity this week remains to be seen.
