Yahoo News 'Like we planned' - Unai Emery delivers verdict on Aston Villa draw at Ipswich Town
Unai Emery thought Aston Villa's 2-2 draw with Ipswich Town was a fair result as his side's 100 per cent record on the road this season came to an end at Portman Road.
Villa fell behind early on when Liam Delap scored his first goal of the game, before Morgan Rogers opened his account for the campaign in the 15th minute. Ollie Watkins then put Villa in the lead before the break, but Delap ensured the Tractor Boys would earn their fourth consecutive draw by scoring again with 20 minutes to play.
"The result is fair and we are in a process as a team working out how we can build strongly our tactics and mentality with some new players getting progressively better," Emery said. "More or less, my thoughts are that one match like, after the first half, we came back the result and controlled the match like we planned.
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"When teams play at home they are pushing and more or less demanding more from us, focus and tactically defensively and offensively. We need to control the game again like we didn’t do in the second half.
"The result was fair and we could have even lost the match in the end. I am accepting the point, but in the way I want to raise our level and demands, I accept it in our process.
Emery added: "Overall we have 13 points, but today we were as well optimistic about the possibility to get to Liverpool with 15 points. We can accept how difficult this league is and playing away, playing against a team like Ipswich who are excited and have a good structure tactically.
"They are playing with confidence and this is the difficulty we faced today in 90 minutes. In the first half we played even better than I had planned to stop their game plan and their capacity to push us.
"In the second half they played like I thought they would in the second half. Of course, in this moment we needed to be stronger than we were.
"For example, we conceded 10 corners and how is the question. We didn’t control the ball and our positioning to stop them to get to our box. They didn’t score through corners, but it showed we didn’t have control."
