JUST BEFORE THE halfway point of another giddy night at Villa Park, Harry Kane dropped deep in his own half to pick up possession, and he then weaved slowly forward, somehow forcing himself by opposition players with a mixture of feather touch and physical force. By the time he approached the halfway line, Kane had the look of a man who desperately wanted to give up the ball but couldn’t, holding onto it like some heirloom of no value aside from sentimental. The reason Kane couldn’t pass the ball was because he feared all of the team-mates ahead of him would stray offside, and so he clung onto the ball until it was taken off him.
Kane then turned around, clumsily fell into the back of Morgan Rogers and cynically swept his feet from underneath him as he fell. The moment was like hearing the priest swear down the microphone at mass: Gentleman Kane does not normally commit these obvious acts of cynicism and frustration. But this is what reasonable men are driven to by Unai Emery’s Aston Villa.
Emery’s appointment is one of those perfect unions between club and coach, where his extreme repetitions and attention to detail have been eagerly swallowed by a group of players eager and humble for instruction and hard work. The product of that is this, a night in which Villa can defang and then beat one of the aristocrats of the European game. Villa are so brilliantly drilled that they compress most of the space between the lines, and they police any long balls over them with on.
