Villa defeated Lille on the way to the Conference League semi-finals in 2024 and reached the Champions League quarter-finals last term. <\/p>\n
And on the evidence of this season, continental glory may well be a realistic prospect for the former European champions.<\/p>\n
Not only was this Villa’s first win in France at the seventh attempt, but it was also a professional display from a team without key personnel, like the injured Matty Cash and Youri Tielemans.<\/p>\n
The return of captain John McGinn – fit enough to make the bench after being sidelined with a knee problem since 18 January – was also a welcome sight with the business end of the season approaching.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks manager Unai Emery has outlined the need to restore structure to his team after domestic defeats by Newcastle, Wolves and Chelsea.<\/p>\n
With Lamare Bogarde ably deputising for Cash and with Pau Torres and Ezri Konsa giving little away defensively, that was evident as they limited Lille to very few promising positions.<\/p>\n
And once Watkins scored to inject further belief, the visitors very much resembled the team that won seven of their eight league-phase fixtures and climbed as high as third in the Premier League.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Villa defeated Lille on the way to the Conference League semi-finals in 2024 and reached the Champions League…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-519964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}