Damien
April 30, 2026
We were treated to the best and worst of football this week. Well, maybe not the best or the worst, but the PSG match was great and Arsenal last night was good, Arsenal.
But at this stage of the tournament, the two teams outside the Champions League are unlikely to be disappointed as they both know they have an advantage going into the second game.
And I’m not saying we have to wait until next week, but there is some context. That said, and I’ll probably come back to this soon, I think tonight is very important.
It’s not just that we want to win tonight, just like Bayern and Arsenal wanted to win away, we have to show that too and not hope that everything will be at Villa Park next week.
On Forest for a while and I for one think they will stay up and I think a Premier League with Nottingham Forest is a better Premier League. But if we’ve learned anything in recent weeks, it’s that tonight will be difficult. Forest did not lose in April and scored twelve goals. Even though we only lost once and scored twelve goals, we conceded six times, twice as many as Forest.
There are many ways to look at it, but for me, they know how to score, just like us, but they have a solid defense. It’s not a better defense than us, but Sunderland beat us to three points and nothing to Forest. It could have been an off day for Sunderland and that’s how I’ll look at it.
But whichever way you look at tonight, in its current form, it’s a very balanced match. League position doesn’t matter tonight.
And tonight is about wanting more. It’s about control, desire and purpose. I think we’ll know after tonight if we play the final next month because we’ll see if they really want to. And if they really want it tonight, we know they can score a few.
Match the BBC Facts
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Nottingham Forest are unbeaten in their last four home games against Aston Villa, all in the Premier League (W2 D2), with a 1-1 draw earlier this month at the City Ground. Villa last won there in March 2019 in the Championship under Dean Smith.
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This is the first major European semi-final between two English teams since the 2008-09 UEFA Champions League between Arsenal and Man Utd, which the Red Devils won 4-1 on aggregate.
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Nottingham Forest are in their fourth major European semi-final, having played at this stage in the 1978-79 and 1979-80 European Cups – reaching and winning the final on both occasions – and the 1983-84 UEFA Cup where they lost 3-2 on aggregate to Anderlecht.
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For the second time in the last three seasons, Aston Villa find themselves in a major European semi-final, losing 6-2 on aggregate to Olympiakos in the 2023-24 Conference League. Before that, their only other last four appearance came in the 1981-82 European Cup, when they knocked out Anderlecht.
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Nottingham Forest had 232 shots, 88 shots on target and 414 touches in the opponent’s box, the second most of any team in the UEFA Europa League this season behind Bologna in each category. However, they are the ones who have accumulated the most xG (27.8).
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Aston Villa have won 11 UEFA Europa League matches this season – only FC Porto in 2010-11 (12), Atlético Madrid in 2011-12 (13) and Chelsea in 2018-19 (12) have won more in a single season. Villa have won their last nine matches in a row – the only English st7 team to achieve 10 consecutive victories in major European football is Manchester City between May 2023 and March 2024.
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Nottingham Forest have scored five goals in their opening two UEFA Europa League matches this season, but they have only conceded seven in 12 since then, with only Freiburg (0.5) conceding fewer per game from MD3 in the group stage than Forest (0.6), while Forest have faced the fewest shots on target per game during that time (2.6).
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Aston Villa manager Unai Emery is set to play in his seventh UEFA Europa League semi-final (since 2009-10) – no other manager has appeared in more than three. He lost his first match in 2011-12 with Valencia, but has progressed in each of his last five, with Sevilla (2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16), Arsenal (2018-19) and Villarreal (2020-21).
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Ollie Watkins has been involved in a goal in each of his last four UEFA Europa League matches for Aston Villa (4 goals, 1 assist). Wayne Rooney is the only Englishman to have scored or assisted in more consecutive matches (since 2009-10), doing so seven times in a row between February 2012 and November 2016 for Man Utd.
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Only three players have created more chances in the UEFA Europa League this season than Nottingham Forest’s Callum Hudson-Odoi (23), while only three Englishmen have created more chances in a season since 2009-10: James Milner (31) and Adam Lallana (24) in 2015-16 for Liverpool and James Ward-Prowse in 2023-24 for West Ham (25).
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