Unai Emery believes Aston Villa earned a “fair” point against a Liverpool team he regards the best in Europe. Trent Alexander-Arnold netted a second-half leveller to ensure the Reds a 2-2 Premier League draw at Villa Park on Wednesday evening.
The Reds had gone ahead on 29 minutes through Mohamed Salah’s 28th goal of the season only to be behind by the break due to quickfire goals from Youri Tielemans and Ollie Watkins.
And while Liverpool duo Diogo Jota and substitute Darwin Nunez spurned two superb chances, with the former also hitting the crossbar, Emery was adamant his team merited the stalemate.
I’m not happy when we don’t win,” said Emery. “We were in the process where we want to get stronger in the Premier League.
“We can play against teams who can be better than us but we have to compete with them and try to get better with the possibilities of dominating against Liverpool, to compete to get chances.
“Liverpool is the best team in the Premier League and the best team in the Champions League, but we competed. We showed our capacity to face them, and more or less to get close to the victory.
“The result is very fair for both teams because they had chances and we had a good chance at the end and in the last 10-20 minutes we maybe deserved more.
“But over 90 minutes it was fair even though they had more clear chances than us. I am positive, this draw is adding one point to the table, not enough but you have to keep going
You have to keep positivity going and keep improving with the players who joined and the style we are trying to play.”
Liverpool’s opening goal came when new Villa signing Andre Garcia played a pass straight to Jota who teed up Salah to score.
And Emery said: “We have to try to avoid mistakes, but we have to accept when me make mistakes we need to learn from it and move on from it. We can’t have the mistakes like we had today.
