Martin Keown urged Ezri Konsa to somehow put a stop to Morgan Rogers “losing the ball” so often after Aston Villa’s Europa League win over Bologna on Thursday night.
John McGinn scored the only goal of the night to give Villa their first win this season after a difficult start to their Premier League campaign sees them in 18th place in the top flight.
Director Monchi has left the club and Unai Emery is under pressure at Villa Park as a number of his players have failed to reach the heights of last season.
Rogers is one of those struggling for form and was particularly wasteful against Bologna, though we’re not quite sure how Konsa “becoming a leader” would stop him “losing the ball 28 or 29 times”, as Keown suggested to him after the game.
Keown asked Konsa: “Is that the next step for you now to become a leader? To get these guys through, we look at Morgan Rogers tonight, I think he lost the ball 28 or 29 times. We’ve never really seen him do that before.
“It’s about, we know what’s under the bonnet, but encouraging him to do more.”
A presumably baffled Konsa replied: “Morgan is still young, I think a lot of people forget. He had a great season for us last year, but you know, coming into this season, he hasn’t quite started the way he wanted to.
“But for me, he’s a good friend of mine, I try to encourage him as much as possible, even though he lost the ball a lot of times. It’s important for a player like him, you have to keep getting it.
“The good thing about him he keeps trying. No matter how many times he loses it, he keeps going. For me, that’s really important.”
Emery hailed the Aston Villa fans after the victory and was happy with the “fight” his players showed against the Serie A side.
“I’m grateful for our supporters,” Emery told VillaTV. “We are starting again in Europe, three years in a row playing in Europe in different competitions – Conference League, Champions League and Europa League.
“Of course, to be in Europe is an opportunity to get minutes with the players, get confidence playing matches, it’s a way for a trophy, it’s a way for Europe for next year.
“The Premier League is the most important because it’s the competition through which we are achieving our objectives normally.
“If you are winning a cup, you can get one objective, if you are winning something in Europe, as well, it’s an objective.
“We need now to try and keep our consistency, like we did here, in 90 minutes I think we played a difficult match.
“We needed to adapt to them, we need to improve some moments and we needed to fight a lot of duels on the field and we did it.
“But, overall, how we are reacting – because we can see the last matches from two sides.”