Chelsea face Aston Villa as the winter slog starts clicking into gear. The newly promoted side is a bit of an oddball and could cause issues.
When Aston Villa dropped, they went down with decades of baggage that had built up while they remained in the first division. A bloated wage bill and an apathy that had been building threatened to keep them in the Championship for a very long time. That appeared true last season as well as Steve Bruce was sacked early into October after a woeful start. Dean Smith, a boyhood fan, was brought in from Brentford and recruited John Terry as his assistant.
They quickly turned things around from Bruce’s languid play with exciting, fluid, and effective football. Buoyed by on loan Chelsea striker Tammy Abraham, Aston Villa came back to life to qualify for the playoffs. It was there that they would defeat Frank Lampard’s Derby County, likely opening the door for Lampard as Chelsea manager this season along the way.
In the Premier League, Aston Villa has kept the vast majority of their exciting play and has stayed mostly afloat. They are tenacious and somewhat odd tactically (a common trait among all three promoted teams this season). Lampard will have a tricky test as Terry comes home with his new team.
Formation is surely the most normal thing about Villa. They play a very normal looking 4-3-3 that will fold into a 4-1-4-1 on defense. It is how they deploy it that is somewhat outside the norm for most teams.
Villa plays extremely vertically on attack. They have some of the lowest amounts of passes from when the win the ball back to when they lose it again or score. Conventional wisdom would say they play a lot of long balls to achieve that. It would be wrong. They also have a very low amount of long balls relative to the rest of the league. At most, they may start a move with one.
The discrepancy is largely dribble based. Villa has a lot of players who like to and are good at dribbling. A few quick run twos could immediately be followed by a through ball and then a run on goal. Or a ball up to a forward could be flicked on as the entire team comes crashing into the play to assist.
Speaking of crashing, that describes their defense pretty well also. Villa attacks, and defends, as a pack. Whenever they do lose the ball, the initial press is brief as they are able to set up defensively very quickly from almost any position. That means the opposition needs to play quickly to break them down. And playing that quickly leaves gaps that they will then look to exploit just as quickly if they win the ball back.
Chelsea’s biggest advantage is that this style of play really requires perfection at every moment. Anything less and there will be a gap to exploit. That is largely why they have been able to stay competitive for long swaths of matches against anyone while still being 15th on the table.
Aston Villa will come to play as they always do. Chelsea needs to be aware that the best way to deal with them may be to maintain as much control over the match as possible. If the Blues allow Villa to grab a hold of any momentum, the game has the chance of turning into a back and forth slug fest like the match against Manchester United. Villa, like all the promoted teams, is not showing any fear and the biggest clubs need to be aware.