View: Aston Villa have to target Everton weak link to score first win of 22/23
Aston Villa are looking to bounce back from a disappointing opening day defeat away at Bournemouth as they welcome Everton to the Midlands.
Frank Lampard’s Toffees also suffered defeat last weekend as a Jorginho penalty was enough to see Chelsea leave Merseyside with all three points as the Villans made the trip home from the South Coast empty-handed.
Saturday’s lunchtime kick-off presents a great opportunity for both sides to launch their 2022-23 campaign and Villa boss Steven Gerrard will be confident of getting one over his former England teammate.
Especially when he reviews Everton’s performance at home to Thomas Tuchel’s Blues and sees the magnitude of problems in defence that his side can exploit.
One issue they did struggle with against Chelsea was simply marking the players who could cause the most problems to them and it happened very regularly.
In this instance, Two players are charging toward the six-yard box with nobody near them but they got away with it as the midfielder took aim from distance rather than play a pass of any kind.
It happened again in the second half as they failed to learn from their errors and new recruit James Tarkowski was almost holding down the fort on his own at times.
Conor Coady has since joined the club and should make his debut against Aston Villa in the back three but even he might not have all of these problems sorted straight away.
Even when they do kind of mark a threat, they still leave gaps for them to exploit as Ben Chilwell proved by turning and surging into the penalty area to win the spot-kick that won the game.
Lucas Digne could get sweet revenge on his former side in this inside channel that seems to confuse the Toffees backline who are also without Ben Godfrey and Yerry Mina through injury.
In other Aston Villa news, £30million worth of shares have been issued to the club to help pay off debts and give Gerrard a much-needed boost in the transfer market.