Unai Emery's Thursday Night Obsession

While the rest of the Premier League is busy pretending to care about the Champions League coefficient, Unai Emery has decided that Thursday nights at Villa Park are his personal fiefdom. The man simply refuses to lose in this competition. It is borderline obsessive. If you offered Emery a choice between a romantic dinner and a tactical breakdown of a Serbian mid-table side's defensive transitions, he would be checking the line-ups before you could finish the sentence.

Villa head into this quarter-final second leg with a 3-1 cushion that feels less like a lead and more like a foregone conclusion. Ollie Watkins is currently playing with the kind of confidence that suggests he could score with his eyes closed and his laces tied together. After bagging a brace in Italy, he is essentially the Boogeyman for a Bologna defense that looked like they were defending with pool noodles during the first leg.

Bologna, sitting a respectable but utterly unthreatening 8th in Serie A, arrive in Birmingham as the self-proclaimed road warriors of the competition. They have won five straight away games, which is impressive until you realize they are walking into a stadium where Villa have won eight consecutive European matches. Jonathan Rowe’s goal in the first leg gave them a flicker of hope, but at Villa Park, hope is usually extinguished within twenty minutes by a high line and a relentless press.

The Italians are scrappy, sure. They play with that typical Serie A grit that usually involves a lot of tactical fouling and dramatic gestures toward the referee. But against a Villa side sitting 4th in the Premier League and hunting their first major European trophy since 1982, grit usually isn't enough. Expect Villa to sit back, let Bologna exhaust themselves with useless possession, and then KILL them on the counter.

Prediction: Aston Villa 2-0 Bologna