Villa’s boss was furious with the decision to award a penalty after the centre-half’s handball blunder that gifted Club Brugge a route to victory
Unai Emery said Tyrone Mings’s error will ‘never be repeated’ as Aston Villa’s Champions League bandwagon ground to an abrupt halt.
Villa’s boss was furious with the decision to award a penalty after the centre-half’s handball blunder that gifted Club Brugge a route to victory. Emery’s men were eyeing a fourth straight victory in the competition but the early second-half lapse put them on the back foot.
Mings mistakenly handled after Emi Martinez kicked the ball to him from a goal kick. It was similar to the incident of seven months ago at the Emirates when Arsenal defender Gabriel and David Raya so infuriated Thomas Tuchel.
Emery said: “This mistake is not going to be repeated again, I think never in my life, never again. We work to try to control games through keeping possession. We were always in position to recover – but this is a very strange mistake.”
The 52nd-minute controversy gave Bruges a foothold in the game and they fought for their lives to defend it.
Mings, who had already been booked for an elbow, was running the risk of a dismissal and fellow Villa defender Ezri Konsa said the referee should have sent him off if he thought the handball was deliberate.
He said: “I didn’t see it. But I saw their players running towards the ref saying: ‘Handball,’ and who knows? It’s just one of those. It killed the game.
“It was goalless and I think if it is a deliberate handball and he’s on a yellow already, why didn’t he send him off? It killed the game. It’s a mistake. It’s not a mistake we want to make but there’s nothing we can do now, we’ve got to move on from it.”
Bruges coach Nicky Hayen said: “For sure it was a penalty and we knew it immediately. He took the ball and pushed it back. In the end, it was a penalty. But if we had to concede something like that, it would have been very sour. It’s a small present that we will take on gladly.”
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