{"id":684133,"date":"2026-05-21T00:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T00:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/684133\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T00:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T00:58:09","slug":"aston-villa-win-europa-league-emi-martinez-plays-despite-breaking-finger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/684133\/","title":{"rendered":"Aston Villa win Europa League: Emi Martinez plays despite breaking finger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aston Villa<\/a> goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez revealed he broke his finger during the warm-up before his side’s Europa League final win against Freiburg.<\/p>\n

The Argentine suffered the injury moments before kick-off in Istanbul and had to be checked over by a physio.<\/p>\n

But he managed to play the entire match on Wednesday as Villa won 3-0 to secure their first European trophy for 44 years.<\/p>\n

The 33-year-old did not have much to do, as goals from Youri Tielemans, Emi Buendia and Morgan Rogers ended Villa’s 30-year wait for a major trophy, but still managed to make two saves.<\/p>\n

He said: “Today I broke my finger during the warm-up and for me, every bad thing brings something good. I’ve done this my whole life and I’ll keep doing it.<\/p>\n

“Should I be worried? Well, I’ve never had a broken finger before. Every time I caught the ball, it went the other way. But these are things you have to go through, and I’m proud to defend Aston Villa<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The injury also did not stop Martinez from joining in the post-match celebrations as he jumped into the Villa fans before hoisting manager Unai Emery aloft.<\/p>\n

Argentina will hope Martinez’s injury is not too serious with their World Cup squad set to be announced before next month’s tournament in the USA, Canada and Mexico.<\/p>\n

The former Arsenal<\/a> keeper has now won every final he has played in during his career, including the FA Cup final, the World Cup final, two Copa Americas and now the Europa League.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aston Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez revealed he broke his finger during the warm-up before his side’s Europa League…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-684133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}