Bertrand Traoré stuns 10-man Leicester with late winner for Aston Villa

Aston Villa clinched a late win at Leicester courtesy of a sumptuous first-time strike by the substitute Bertrand Traoré to fuel their hopes of playing European football next season. Leicester can only dream of such grand stages after defeat extended their miserable run. Leicester, who sacked Brendan Rodgers last weekend, remain in a sorry predicament, entrenched in the Premier League relegation zone and winless in eight matches. The damning reality is they have taken just four points since winning the reverse fixture at Villa Park at the beginning of February.

With seconds of three minutes of second-half stoppage time to play, Leicester thought they had won a penalty, only for a VAR review to deem Patson Daka’s bump on Ollie Watkins a foul. Watkins opened the scoring before Harvey Barnes cancelled out his first-half strike. To make matters worse, Leicester will be without Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall for their crucial home match with Bournemouth on Saturday after the midfielder was sent off with 20 minutes to play.

This game was originally scheduled for September but was postponed owing to the Queen’s death and while both teams were struggling at the time – Villa were 18th with four points from their first six matches and Leicester were bottom with one – Villa have shot up the table since Unai Emery replaced Steven Gerrard as manager in October. On Sunday the Leicester chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha recognised the need for a similar uplift and reluctantly decided to dismiss Brendan Rodgers after conceding his team’s top-flight status was at serious risk. Srivaddhanaprabha flew in from Thailand for this match and applauded as Leicester’s former midfielder, Alan Birchenall, with the pre-match sprinklers for company,