Lars Sivertsen

It's really good.

This is a great plan.

Maybe this is how they drew it up, but I feel like there would be a bit of a hush and a silence falling over the room, and Uri Thielman's going, yeah, okay.

I mean, I guess this is an easy scheme for us to pull out.

I'm just going to hit that volley 10 out of 10 times.

He's also such an unusual type of player.

He reminds you of a mid-90s box-to-box midfielder of the kind that just doesn't exist anymore.

And Emery has found the perfect way to use that because the way football is now, you probably don't want that right in the middle of the park because he'll leave a lot of gaps because he needs the freedom to move around and find good positions and get forward.

So you use him as this sort of strange inside winger type of thing that Emery does with the freedom to, I think, go pretty much wherever he wants.

And it seems to be a really smart way of figuring out how to use this very unique set of characteristics that he has in a way that really works for the team.

It's maybe noticeable or interesting that in the two seasons we've had of the Europa League since, they changed the format so that you don't get teams coming in from the Champions League, from the group stages.

The teams Mourinho very humorously referred to as the failed sharks from the Champions League, which is a great phrase.

We no longer get the frail sharks anymore.

In those two seasons, we've had an all-English final, and now we had an English winner with two English teams knocking each other, knocking that one English team knocked out in the semis in an all-English affair.

I do wonder if this is a trend we'll be seeing, and this is not taking anything away from Villa whatsoever.

But without those also rounds for the Champions League, I don't know if there are any... You're not going to have a lot of teams in the Europa League that can...

you know, compete with the sort of financial firepower that the mid-ranking teams from England bring.

At the end of the day, Villa's wage bill is about three times what Freiburg's is.

So, and this will be the story very often.

And again, not taking anything away from them, but I do think that's an unintended consequence of changing the format in that way.