Aston Villa are third in the Premier League and some are talking about them as challengers for the title
Simon Jordan.(Image: talkSPORT/YouTube)
Unai Emery is ‘turning water into wine’ as he keeps Aston Villa in the upper echelons of the Premier League – and even in the title conversation.
That’s according to pundit Simon Jordan who believes Arsenal will win the Premier League crown, even though Manchester City and Villa are respectively only two and three points behind them in the table.
Indeed Villa are on a ten-game winning run and are now seven points clear of fourth-placed Chelsea, leading many to suggest they could challenge the Gunners for the championship.
They are doing so having had a modest transfer window in the summer and with few predicting any major signings next month. Jordan believes Arsenal’s bigger revenue streams give them an important edge in the market – and ultimately on the pitch.
“It’s great. It flies in the face of all the observations about Emery at the beginning of the season and it flies in the face of their recent form up until about the last four games where they weren’t scoring many goals,” the former Crystal Palace owner told talkSPORT.
“So they’ve hit a real momentum, after 13 games they’d scored, they’ve scored 16 goals in the league. That’s now changed overnight it’s changed.
“Last January, yes, they did strengthen, but they lost the kid going to Saudi Arabia, didn’t they?
“[Jhon] Duran, who I thought was a very good player but seemingly didn’t have the right attitude because he felt the money in Saudi Arabia was more important than perhaps the opportunity of playing in the Premier League – that tells you something about the player.
“He’s a great manager, you look at it and you think it would be great for Aston Villa. It’s a club that I hold in the highest regard. I knew Doug Ellis very well, I liked him a lot.
“I grew up at that time when, you know, the Dennis Mortimers and the Peter Withes were winning European Cups for Aston Villa in ’82, and you look back at that club and you think ‘It’s a great club’.
“It feels that this is Arsenal’s time because it feels they’ve got a bigger and better squad with more depth when the muck and bullets start flying in around February and March.
“Unless Villa are going to go hard and the difficulty for Villa was the reason why they go down the loan route is because PSR challenges bite their backside, and they can’t just do what perhaps an Arsenal can do, because Arsenal’s turnover is £500-600 million quid, they’ve got a different dynamic than Aston Villa, so they’re not caught by PSR as quickly and as easily as Villa have been.
“It feels to me that Emery is turning water into wine and how long that stays, I don’t know, but what it does do is it adds a different conundrum to the title race because it makes Villa, the outsiders, look like they’re competing for a Premier League title, which means that it isn’t just Arsenal and Man City sauntering to an eventual outcome.”
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