Dan Bardell looks at Aston Villa's increased use of longer passing under Unai Emery and why Zion Suzuki, Nicolas Jackson and Johan Manzambi have given Villa a new route up the pitch without abandoning the football that has defined the Emery era
There was a statistic before Aston Villa's win at Tottenham that caught my attention because it backed up something that has become increasingly noticeable when watching this new version of Unai Emery's side. Villa are going longer much more often than they did last season, and against Spurs that wasn't simply an occasional escape route when they were under pressure, it became a fundamental part of how they approached the game.
Villa made 51 long passes compared with Tottenham's 34, despite Spurs making 581 passes overall compared with Villa's 336. That meant 15.2 per cent of Villa's passes were classified as long compared with just 5.9 per cent of Tottenham's, and although the phrase "long ball" still tends to conjure up an image of somebody launching it hopefully towards a big centre-forward, that isn't really what we're talking about here.
Zion Suzuki changes the possibilities because his distribution is such a weapon. Some of the passes he plays along the ground travel huge distances and technically qualify as long passes, but watching them doesn't feel like watching a team bypassing the midfield because he's simply hitting an area and hoping somebody competes for it. He can punch the ball accurately into players around the halfway line, he can switch the point of attack and he can go diagonally into the spaces opposition full-backs have vacated, which means Villa can suddenly travel 30 or 40 yards without having to put together six or seven passes to get there.
That was particularly relevant against Tottenham because of the way they want to dominate possession and push their full-backs forward. Suzuki didn't complete every one of those passes and there were a few that went out of play, particularly during the first half, but even those balls serve a purpose because they tell the opposition that the space behind them is going to be attacked. If you keep showing a full-back that Villa are capable of hitting that area quickly, eventually he has to think twice about how aggressively he pushes forward.
The other reason it works is because Villa now have attacking players suited to it. Nicolas Jackson is excellent at occupying centre-halves and moving into the channels, while Johan Manzambi gives Villa somebody who can get close enough to him to collect second balls, carry possession forward and immediately turn a direct pass into an attack. That was one of the things Villa had been missing earlier in the season when Jackson could sometimes look isolated, because going long is considerably less effective if the striker wins his battle and then discovers there is nobody within 20 yards of him.
I don't think this represents Emery abandoning the principles we've become accustomed to at Villa. If anything, I think it's another example of why he is such an interesting manager tactically because he isn't precious about how his team gets from one end of the pitch to the other. Villa can still build through midfield and they can still dominate possession when a particular opponent allows them to do that, but if the players available give Emery another route towards goal, he's going to use it.
We saw something similar last season with Villa's willingness to shoot from distance. At a time when so much football is geared towards working the ball into supposedly optimal shooting positions, Villa became very good at manufacturing space around the edge of the penalty area and encouraging players to use it. Buendía's goal at Tottenham was another example of that, and I think the increased use of longer passes belongs to the same idea: if everybody else is defending against one type of football, there is value in being prepared to attack them differently.
That's why I don't particularly like describing this as Villa becoming a long-ball team because that implies something far more simplistic than what we're actually watching. It is another weapon, and perhaps a particularly useful one for a squad that now contains a goalkeeper with Suzuki's passing range, a striker with Jackson's movement and pace and attacking midfielders capable of carrying the ball once Villa have broken the first line.
The challenge after the international break will be working out how much of what we saw at Tottenham was specifically designed for that opponent and how much becomes a permanent feature of this Villa side. With Emery, the answer will probably change from week to week, but having another way of hurting teams can only make Villa more difficult to prepare for.
