Unai Emery reveals secret to Aston Villa win

Villa trailed to Matheus Cunha’s opener at the break and the boss described the first half performance as the worst 45 minutes of his reign.

But his team then hit back, for the second week in succession, to win 3-1 thanks to goals from Ollie Watkins, Ezri Konsa and Jhin Duran.

Emery headed down the tunnel before the referee blew for half-time.

And he said: “I was angry but with myself. Because the result was bad and the performance not very good.

“I was thinking how I could help the players to change it. I tried to meet with our coaches in the beginning to speak about the first half, how we could come back.

“I accept the performance of the opponent and we were respecting them, knowing their capacity.

“The second half we changed. In the beginning to come back in our gameplan, then bringing on fresh players and the energy to use our supporters.

“The first half was a little bit quiet because we were not transmitting through our performance. The second half was better.

“The first half was the worst we have played since I have been here. We did not play with energy.”

The comeback was Villa’s second in a week after they came from two goals down to beat Everton 3-2 the previous Saturday.

Asked what he had said at the break, Emery said: “There is not a lot of time to change a lot of things. The most important thing is to send two or three messages and change something.

“We changed two players and also the gameplan, being more aggressive in the same structure, changing the capacity to keep possession like they did in the first half.

“We needed to recover the ball faster and through that were able to get the ball into the box and create more chances.”