What hurt Aston Villa fans most about the defeat to ten-man Brentford on Sunday afternoon was not the frustration but the inevitability.
This was a match they had seen before, a match of alarming frequency over the last couple of seasons and a problem that Unai Emery just cannot seem to solve.
That is good news, not bad.
From a points perspective the weekend could hardly have gone worse for Villa, who saw their slim hopes of a title challenge collapsed once and for all and re-entered a race for Champions League football they must have thought they had already won.
The Villa fans had almost literally seen Sunday’s game before, given that Emery’s side lost 1-0 at the GTech Community Stadium back in August, again thanks to a Dango Ouattara goal, again thanks to Keith Andrews’ low block frustrating a Villa side that spent far too long passing the ball sideways, unable to work out how to break it down.
This is a long-standing pattern. Emery does not perform well against low blocks.
That’s why playing against ten men on Sunday made it harder for Villa, reflected in a remarkable statistics: they completed 355 passes in the second half, their most passes in a single half of Premier League of football on record (since 2003/04).
The tactical style of this game, the performance, and indeed the result did not come as a surprise to supporters – and that is why it does not signify a long-term downward trend.
Villa have always struggled in games like that under Emery, whose tactical foundations are exclusively built on luring the opposition press forward before breaking the lines.
He can manipulate the other team in multiple different ways but all of them require the other side to come out to meet them, and when they don’t – when they stubbornly refuse to leave their low block - he invariably fails.
Villa have held more than 60% possession in five Premier League matches this season and have won just one of them, statistical evidence of the highest order for the tactical issue that has always affected Emery.
Two of those games happen to be Villa’s last two home games, the 1-0 defeats to Brentford and Everton, while the other two they didn’t win were the reverse fixture against Brentford and a 1-1 draw against Sunderland in which Regis le Bris’ side went down to ten men after 33 minutes.
The only game Villa won was a 3-1 against Nottingham Forest, also last month, when Ollie Watkins scored a screamer from nothing and John McGinn rolled the ball into an empty net from 40 yards.
There will come on a time when Villa’s Premier League opponents cotton on and decide, en masse, to back right off. But until then, there is no reason for Villa to panic – as long as they don’t force the other side into red cards and the defensive retreat that follows.
And there is no reason to panic about the league position either.
The gap to sixth (fifth will almost certainly be a Champions League spot again) is still seven points despite the fact Villa’s form is at a season low and Chelsea and Manchester United are at the absolute peak of their new-manager bounces.
It would be naïve to assume any of these three clubs will remain on the trajectory of the past three weeks.
It is fashionable this week to start to predict Aston Villa’s decline. But their next three Premier League fixtures - Bournemouth (a), Brighton (h), and Leeds (h) – will bring back the more expansive and transitional Villa.
The fact that we could see the Brentford showing coming means it is not fatigue, regression to the mean, or anything other than an entirely expected bump in the road.
Emery might continue to downplay the club’s chances of qualifying for the Champions League - but the underlying evidence tells us he need not be so anxious.
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