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One man who does not think Villa are in the title race is manager Unai Emery. When asked after the win at Chelsea if he felt his side were contenders, he said:
Not really. I’m not feeling it. I’m feeling that we are competing very well. We are third in the league with two teams, Manchester City and Arsenal, fantastic performances they are getting.
We have to play 38 matches. We are today on 18. There are 20 matches to play, teams like Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United…we must compete against them and try to be more or less consistent like we are now. But even being consistent and performing like we are now, there are Arsenal and Manchester City in front of us.
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Where better to start than at Stamford Bridge, where for the first 45 minutes Chelsea resembled a team who could challenge for the title and Aston Villa looked nothing of the sort. Then Unai Emery made a triple change and flipped the entire narrative on its head as Ollie Watkins bagged twice to give Villa an 11th victory in a row. Villa couldn’t do it, could they?
Jacob Steinberg was in west London and here is how he saw it:
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Preamble
Hello and welcome to matchday live! Over the next few hours I’ll be building up today’s main games this afternoon while keeping you updated on the latest football news as it comes in. We have a couple of fixtures in the Premier League today, kicking-off with Sunderland v Leeds at 2pm, but before then there’s also some Afcon action and AC Milan feature in the early game from Serie A. First let’s have a look at yesterday’s big headlines…
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