Villarreal came within 45 minutes of the Champions League final on Tuesday night, only to run out of ideas.
Unai Emery’s team produced a stellar first half performance and took an improbable 2 – 0 lead. The tie was all square, and Liverpool were not at their best.
Disappointingly, Villarreal had 0 shots and conceded 13 in the second half to lose the game 3-2, and the tie 5-2.
All the talk will be about Liverpool and the quadruple. Deservedly so, because they are a great team on the verge of history.
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However, Villarreal deserve huge credit today. Not only for this season, but for their incredible European run that stretches back to the Europa League last season.
There is a reason Liverpool were so nervy in the first half on Tuesday night. Arsenal, Manchester United, Juventus, Bayern Munich. All these prestigious teams have been put to the sword by the yellow submarine on their journey to becoming Europa League champions and Champions League semi finalists.
Once they leveled the tie, everybody was thinking that another unlikely result was on the cards.
In truth, Unai Emery probably pushed his luck to the limit against Liverpool. Gerard Moreno, who started despite not being fit, could no longer run after 35 minutes. In hindsight, perhaps he should have been taken off at half time. No team can press that intensely for an entire game, certainly not with only 10 and a half players.
In the end, it’s another anticlimactic chapter in the contradictory career of Unai Emery. His team’s collapse on Tuesday is emblematic of his previous failures. Rather than pushing on, they went into their shells.
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Emery is a brave man, but a conservative football coach. He is capable of building a team of unlikely heroes and can be lethal in European knockout games. His plucky underdog spirit, though, is too often dampened by his instinct to defend rather than attack.
Nonetheless, he deserves recognition. After underwhelming spells at PSG and Arsenal, Emery has once again proved his ability to coach a team to be more than the sum of its parts. There is no shame in losing to Liverpool, just ask the entire Premier League. However, it will go down as another ‘what might have been’ moment in the Spaniard’s career.
