Watford edge five-goal Villa thriller

“For the first 15-20 minutes I thought our high pressure was very hard for Aston Villa to manage and we controlled the situations”. That’s my honest assessment of it. Villa also tied the club record for the number of home games – eight – without a win.

Aston Villa manager Remi Garde wants to make changes after his side’s 3-2 defeat to Watford at Villa Park on Saturday afternoon, per Eurosport.

Jack Grealish was due to train with Aston Villa’s under-21 squad on Monday but could return to the first-team fold later as boss Remi Garde contemplates changes.

But it was too little, too late and Watford comfortably negotiated injury time to earn their first win at Villa Park in nine visits since their last success at the ground in 1969.

Grealish made his Villa debut in 2014 and has made 12 appearances, scoring once, this season.

The Watford striker, who has a Blues tattoo on his leg, headed the Hornets’ third goal to help leave Villa seven points adrift at the foot of the table.

He was then seen out again in Birmingham on Sunday night, when the players were due in for training the following morning, and has since been disciplined by being asked to train with the club’s Under-21s.

Jordan Ayew turned a glorious opportunity wide minutes later and it looked like it was going to be another one of those days. He thought that they “were not lucky” as they had been in the 0-0 draw with Manchester City two weeks ago, and “conceded silly goals”.

“We weren’t even fighting for each other”, said Richards. I think a lot depends on how we start up front as well.

He said: “It is a huge game but it is not the end of the season, nobody will be relegated at the end of the weekend”. We want to, of course, win this game and we are going to try and do it in the way we want. “We pressed the pitch really high, stopped the long ball coming in and they kind of struggled after that”.

We’ll have lineups below before the match kicks off, and we’ve also got everything you need to follow along.

Micah Richards was talking exclusively to BBC Sport’s Pat Murphy.