Unai Emery claims Villarreal will need ‘perfect game’ to beat Liverpool

There was a smile from Unai Emery when the stats were read out to him the day before what could well the biggest night in Villarreal’s history: not just the team but the town. This season Liverpool have played 56 games and lost only three, and never by more than two goals. In other words, Jürgen Klopp’s team have not endured the kind of result that Villarreal will have to inflict upon them to progress to the Champions League final.

“You’ve done a good job finding that stat,” the Villarreal coach said. “We had them but I didn’t want to say so. That shows you how difficult it will be to turn it round, but we will work on the game and see if we can. We’ll have to produce a perfect game, reach excellence or get close to it to be able to do something that no one has done to them.”

Villarreal will have to be better than in the first leg certainly and Emery sees hope in playing the second leg at home. There, he said, he hopes his team can find the play that he conceded they were unable to produce in the first meeting, where they were reduced to resisting. That, though, does not necessarily mean opening up and he said his team would have to defend well – the central defender Pau Torres expressed his hope for a “long” game, saying “one goal puts us right back in it and it doesn’t matter if it’s in the first minute or the 60th”.

Asked what makes the second game different, Emery said: “First, we’re at home with our fans. Second, we have to win. Third, we have to defend, but there are lots of ways of defending. We have to do a brutal defensive performance and from that base be able to find something we could not find there [in Liverpool], which is our play. Over 90 minutes, in their ground, they were favourites, they were better