Aston Villa demolished Nottingham Forest’s hopes to charge into the Europa League final and edge closer to ending a 30-year major trophy drought.<\/p>\n
John McGinn’s late double added to Emi Buendia’s penalty and Ollie Watkins’ opener to complete Villa’s comeback against Nottingham Forest after last week’s 1-0 first-leg defeat.<\/p>\n
The hosts booked a final against Bundesliga side Freiburg, who beat Braga 4-3 on aggregate, in Istanbul on 20 May.<\/p>\n
Villa head coach Unai Emery is chasing his fifth Europa League title, having joined the club as a serial winner of this competition. His team will be looking to lift Villa’s first major silverware since the 1996 League Cup, and with it book a Champions League spot.<\/p>\n
They are still fifth in the Premier League and if they finish there and win the Europa League, the team in sixth – currently Bournemouth – will also qualify for the Champions League.<\/p>\n
This was a deserved victory for the hosts, in front of fan Prince William, with Forest rarely threatening without Morgan Gibbs-White.<\/p>\n
The playmaker was only fit enough for the bench following a head injury which required extensive stitches in Monday’s win at Chelsea.<\/p>\n
It took Villa until seven minutes before the break to level on aggregate when Watkins turned in Buendia’s centre from the left.<\/p>\n
They went ahead overall 13 minutes after the break when referee Glenn Nyberg awarded a penalty after reviewing the monitor following a VAR check when Nikola Milenkovic tugged Pau Torres.<\/p>\n
Watkins had a goal disallowed for offside, while Emi Martinez denied Chris Wood at the other end, before McGinn ‘s quickfire two goals wrapped up victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aston Villa demolished Nottingham Forest’s hopes to charge into the Europa League final and edge closer to ending…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-437602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}