Nottingham Forest boss Sean Dyche has been speaking to the media before Saturday’s Premier League game against Aston Villa at Villa Park (kick-off 12:30 GMT).
Here are the key lines from his news conference:
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On team news: “Mostly good, there’s a few carrying a few knocks, but we’re hopeful. Ola [Aina] comes back into the group as well, so it’s good.”
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Dyche revealed he had “conversations” with Howard Webb, the head of PGMOL, following Forest’s 2-1 defeat by Manchester City, adding that while there were “some minor disagreements”, it was nothing more “than just a chat”. He added: “It’s always a game of opinions. VAR is a big talking point, and there are some challenges to VAR and the nature of some decisions. I didn’t think ours were particularly difficult, as I said afterwards, and I still stand by that.”
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Dyche said the “biggest challenge” for his side is being clinical, noting that “everyone’s wanting their players to be clinical, everyone’s wanting to score goals and everyone wants goalscorers”.
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On his tenure at Forest so far: “We’re in a better position than when I got here, and also the Europa League, but concentrate on the Premier League for now – there’s a building process. I think we’ve done some good work, and the players have as well, and then it’s the ups and downs of it. They’re all minor things, but they all count. All of a sudden, you’ve lost three when it could have been certainly a couple [of wins], if not three draws. So it’s frustrating in that respect because of the softness of the goals and not finding that real killer moment to open up the opposition.”
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Dyche reiterated that the only way out of their current predicament is by “doing the work, doing the hard yards on the training pitch, putting them into practice”, stressing that it is “always a work in progress”.
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On facing Aston Villa: “He’s [Unai Emery] done a great job as a manager there. Their recruitment has been good – spent a lot of money, to be fair, on some very good players and they’ve moulded it into a good unit, so certainly a tough game.”
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Dyche added: “We’ve just shown lately, we’ve taken on some of the bigger teams, or the ones that are fancied every year, and done very well against them – and a couple of teams maybe not as fancied, we haven’t done as well against them. That’s probably the challenge of the group – rising to the expectation of each game rather than just big games”.
