Emery blames some players for not following the game plan

A furious Unai Emery has questioned the mentality of some Aston Villa players and admitted his latest attempt to pair Ollie Watkins with John Doon has backfired as Villa missed out on automatic qualification for the Champions League last 16 following a 1-0 defeat at Monaco.

Emery blamed some players for "not following the game plan". When asked to elaborate, the Villa boss tapped his forehead with a finger and said: "We wanted it and we needed it. We demanded a lot from the players we had but some did not execute our plan. My aim is to create the strongest possible team with the right mentality that we are building."

However, Emery seemed to give most of the players a break and praised the professionalism of Emi Buendia, who made his first start since October after being included on loan this month. "Morgan Rogers was a little bit unwell but I think Boubacar Camara, Youri Tielemans, Ezri Konsa, Matty Cash, Emi Martinez and Tyrone Mings all did their best as planned."

Doolan replaced Leon Bailey early in the second half but did not work well alongside Watkins. West Ham had made a tentative bid for Doolan this week but he failed to make a noticeable impact in this game. Despite Watkins and Doolan being considered among the best strikers in Europe, Villa still struggled to create enough scoring chances.

Emery admitted: "The partnership didn't work well this time. It was my mistake. I made a mistake and decided to let two forwards play together, which caused us to lose our positional sense. We were very weak in the midfield and they almost scored the second goal. Before the 70 minutes of the game, we were still in control of the situation, but after that we lost control. This is my challenge because both of them are very good players, but it didn't work out today."

Emery was also disappointed with his side's performance from set pieces. Wilfried Singo scored the only goal of the game from a corner after Thilo Kehrer's shot was saved by Martinez. "Today our set-piece performance was terrible: we had seven corners and none of them threatened the opponent's goal. Games like today are very important and we could have got the three important points. I think we missed the opportunity to get into the top eight and today was the key."