Aston Villa Is Built For This

Perhaps it is not so impressive for a club that finished in the top four of the Premier League last season to barely beat a struggling RB Leipzig on a late and wickedly deflected goal from, of all people, Ross Barkley. Perhaps that doesn't matter, because while Aston Villa looked rickety at times, it went into Germany and came out 3-2 winners in a match that practically assures that the Lions of Birmingham will advance to the next stage of the Champions League, potentially with a direct spot in the round of 16 as one of the eight automatic qualifiers. It was another brick in the wall of competence Villa has been building since around the time I foolishly called them a mirage last season, and it's the type of win that is as important as it is ho-hum, and perhaps more because it is ho-hum.

Allow me to explain. Any time a team outside of England's preconceived elite—normally consisting of the Big Six of both Manchesters, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham—makes it into the Champions League, it's a bit of a crapshoot whether the increase in important and grueling matches will lay that club out, either in the tournament itself or domestically. For an example of the former, look at last season's Newcastle United, which finished dead last in its group. For the latter, go back a bit further to Leicester City the year after it won the Premier League; while the Foxes made the quarterfinals of the Champions League, shocking Sevilla in the round of 16, the focus on the continental tournament led to a disappointing 12th place in the league, as well as early exits in both domestic cups.

How, then, do we square what Villa is doing this season? After the Leipzig victory on Tuesday, the club now sits in third place in the Champions League standings. That's only two points clear of the playoff, but six points safe of elimination, which is precisely where Villa would want to be at this point. It has a signature win in the competition, beating Bayern Munich on Oct. 2, as well as a creditable draw against Juventus. Its only loss might look disappointing on paper, given that it was against Club Brugge, but Brugge has been pretty good in the competition, currently sitting in a healthy 14th place with two matches left. And with the win over Leipzig, which officially eliminated the Germans from the tournament, Villa has only an away match against 11th-place Monaco and a home match against 19th-place Celtic standing between it and the knockouts.

To go back to that Leipzig win, Villa's performance stood out both because of how mediocre it was at times and how well the side bounced back from twice giving up the lead. Even against a weaker side, the ability to hold your nerve and bounce back from disappointments is a signature attribute of good teams, and Villa exhibited that in spades on Tuesday. Before that was needed, though, the visitors came out steaming hot, scoring via John McGinn's finish of a great team move in the third minute and then controlling the game for the following 20 or so minutes, out-shooting Leipzig five to one, and generally looking the more dangerous side ...

... until Emiliano Martínez showed the downside of having a bit of a head case for a goalkeeper. The Villa goalie is, on his best day, one of the world's top keepers, and he's probably the best penalty stopper at the moment. He also is, at his worst, a loose cannon, and sometimes his decisions lead directly to goals for the opponents, as one of them did for Leipzig in the 27th minute.

On the play, Martínez gets caught lounging outside of his penalty box, which seems to give his defenders a false sense of security that he will get to the long ball from Nicolas Seiwald before the onrushing Loïs Openda. Unfortunately, Martínez misjudges the flight of the ball in the air, and begins to backpedal into his box just far enough for Openda to knock the ball onto his right and score into an empty net. Suddenly, with little forewarning and with only the club's second shot, Leipzig had equalized.

Losing a lead to a goalie boner happens, and generally is something a club can bounce back from, and on either side of halftime, Villa did just that. Despite having less possession in the first half hour, the 25 minutes following Openda's goal went the other way, with Villa grabbing 59 percent of the possession. However, that meant Leipzig was able to hit on the counter more effectively, and the shot tally for those same 25 minutes was even at four. For a bit there, it felt like anyone's match. Luckily for Aston Villa, it can bring in Jhon Durán off the bench.

If Durán isn't the best super sub in Europe, he is at the very least the most exciting one. Despite only four starts in his 23 appearances this season across all competitions, Durán has scored 10 goals, including two in the Champions League entering Tuesday's match. (He also scored this very funny goal against West Ham in the Premier League, the club he was rumored to be on the verge of signing with before ultimately staying at Villa.) When he came on at halftime for an injured Ollie Watkins, it felt like only a matter of time before he made his mark. Even the most optimistic (me) and passionate (also me) fans of Durán's clutch goalscoring could not have predicted that he would do so again after just six minutes on the pitch, nor the specific way he did so:

I mean, what can you even say about that? Maybe Peter Gulacsi shouldn't have been so far off his line, or maybe the Leipzig defenders should have closed down Villa's most dangerous player, but sometimes a guy just hits a perfect shot from miles away and you can do nothing but try to claw back into the match. Credit to Leipzig, because it did just that about 10 minutes later with a gorgeous counter-attack. A long ball from left back Benjamin Henrichs found Openda way ahead of the Villa defense—he was so free that I would have sworn he was offside—but the Belgian struggled to bring the ball down to facilitate his own shot. No matter, though, as he took the ball slightly away from goal before lofting a perfect cross to Christoph Baumgartner, who hit a cross-body volley into the far net. For this one, Martínez is not to blame:

Baumgartner's goal was, to me, the key moment in the match, and maybe in Villa's season to date. While it wasn't crucial for Villa to win this one, since a draw would have served them well enough, this is the type of game a club on the ascendancy, with the talent behind it to make a run, should win. Leipzig didn't make it easy, and looked the more dangerous side for about 20 minutes after its second equalizer. This was especially true in the 10 minutes before the introduction of Ross Barkley in the 83rd minute.

I have already mentioned what happened next. Just two minutes after subbing on, Barkley received a deflection about 25 yards from goal. Because he's Ross Barkley, he immediately looked to shoot, and slipped as he made contact with the ball. His flubbed shot took a fortunate deflection off of Lukas Klostermann's back and ricocheted into the complete opposite side of its initial flight plan, leaving Gulacsi in no man's land and Villa up 3-2, a one-goal lead it would not relinquish a third time:

While Villa has had a terrible run of form of late—five losses in seven matches, four of them in a row, along with two draws—it now appears to be on the upswing again, with the win over Leipzig making it three in a row, including a 3-1 rout of ninth-place Premier League side Brentford and a 1-0 squeaker over relegation-favorites Southampton. That's not the most inspiring run, but Villa needed it after its horrid November, and now it heads into the holiday schedule on a high. Most of its matches around Christmas and New Years should be winnable, with only one against a morose Manchester City and a visit to Newcastle jumping out as potential slip-ups.

Otherwise, the next month and a half before the next round of Champions League matches in late January should be smooth sailing for a side that might be figuring out just what it hopes to get out of this season. If the answer is knockout Champions League soccer alongside a respectable top seven or so finish in the Premier League, then Villa is right on track nearing the halfway point of the season. For a club in its enviable but difficult position, navigating all of these important matches with a roster perhaps not as deep as its competitors, Aston Villa can't ask for much more than competence and points, two things it's had in excess so far.