Dan Bardell reflects on another decisive Emi Buendía moment after the Aston Villa attacker produced a superb finish at Tottenham, while his work rate, experience and willingness to help those around him continue to underline his importance to Unai Emery's squad.
I have been critical of Emi Buendía at different points and I'm not going to pretend otherwise simply because he's scored a brilliant goal at Tottenham, but the good thing about criticising an Aston Villa player is that you should always want them to make you look stupid afterwards, and Buendía has a habit of producing exactly the sort of moment that makes you reconsider whatever you were saying about him 20 minutes earlier.
I actually didn't think he had a particularly good first half at Tottenham because the game was physical, Villa weren't controlling possession for long periods and there were occasions when he looked slightly lost operating from the left. That's part of the frustration I've sometimes had with him because you know how technically gifted he is and therefore you want to see him influence games more consistently, particularly when Villa have so many attacking players competing for places and Emery has different options available to him.
The thing with Buendía, though, is that even when he isn't playing particularly well you can never completely discount him from a match because he has the technical quality to produce a moment which changes it, and the goal at Tottenham was the perfect example. Spurs gave him the space and he punished them with a brilliant strike, using that distinctive technique he has with the instep of his foot to send the ball beyond the goalkeeper, and almost immediately you could see what scoring did to him because suddenly he was buzzing around the pitch, becoming involved in everything and playing with a confidence that hadn't quite been there beforehand.
Maybe there was something in getting that first Premier League goal of the season out of the way as well because Villa haven't exactly been troubling the scoresheet during the opening weeks and there will have been attacking players desperate to make that first decisive contribution. Buendía has always been somebody who appears to feed off confidence and emotion, so perhaps having that moment at Tottenham can release him a little bit because once he'd scored it felt as though everything he attempted started to come off.
The other side of his performance shouldn't be ignored because whatever criticism I've had of Buendía has never been about his work ethic, application or how much playing for Aston Villa means to him. He grafts, competes and is willing to do the ugly side of the game, and there was an interesting observation after the Tottenham match that he was constantly communicating with Matteo Ruggieri and trying to keep his confidence up during what was a difficult afternoon for Villa's left-back. I think that's worth mentioning because Buendía is now one of the more experienced players within this group and his role within the squad is different to the one he occupied when he first arrived at the club.
This is a very different Villa squad now, with a lot of young players and plenty of new faces, and at 29 Buendía is no longer simply the creative player trying to establish himself in the team. He is somebody who has been through a serious injury, fought his way back, experienced the highs and lows of Emery's time at the club and remained at Villa through periods when his future might easily have been elsewhere, so there is value in that experience at a time when the dressing room is going through so much change.
The question with Buendía will continue to be whether he can influence games consistently enough with the ball because one brilliant goal doesn't remove every legitimate criticism of his performances, just as one poor game shouldn't erase everything he does well. He will still give possession away, there will still be moments where the physicality of a game appears to work against him and there will probably still be afternoons when I come away wanting more from somebody with his ability.
What Tottenham showed again, however, is why Emery continues to find a place for him and why Buendía remains such an interesting player to assess. He doesn't necessarily have to dominate a football match from beginning to end to decide it because the technique is there to produce something very few players can when an opportunity appears, and when you combine that with the work rate and personality he brings to the group, you can understand why he continues to survive every conversation about what Villa's next attacking evolution should look like.
Sometimes Buendía only needs one moment to change the entire conversation around his performance, and at Tottenham he found it again.
