Don’t call it a remontada: Emery’s Camp Nou comeback focuses European blur

“One more match. Just one more match.” Sure, Unai. Sure. Just like all the other matches that generated a local tremor measured at 1 on the Richter scale when that seventh and final goal went in at the Camp Nou in March 2017.

It was inevitable that Unai Emery would be asked about the Remontada game on the eve of Aston Villa’s Champions League engagement with Barcelona, his own first trip back to the Camp Nou in this competition since one of the most visceral and traumatic experiences of his managerial career.

Emery was Paris Saint-Germain’s manager the night the Neymar-Messi-Suárez triple-godhead reversed a 4-0 first-leg quarter-final deficit in this stadium.

For all the talk of lasting trauma Emery stayed in Paris for another season, won a domestic treble, and three clubs later has two more European trophies to his name. Plus, of course a trip back here now, with only the lurking shadow of being asked to do the Manchester United job hanging over an otherwise cloudless period in his elite coaching career.

“What happened in that match we know. I started coaching in 2004, 22 years in a row. I’ve played in Europe 16 years in a row. And I’ve learnt in all the competitions and matches. And in that match I learnt so, so much.”

European football has done a pretty good job in the last two seasons of turning its autumn fixture blizzard into a hopeless and baggy blur. What serious sport actually has a 36-team mega table? And a deeply predictable 36-team mega-table at that, one where you pretty much know who’s going to be up there at the end of it. If the intention was to create a series of exhibition-style TV-product events, thereby heading off the Super League’s desire to do exactly the same, then mission semi-accomplished.

There are still exceptions in the period of drift, one-off events that speak to the colour and cultural weight of this competition. Tuesday night is one of them, for Villa’s fans a genuine staging point in the progress of this ever-evolving team, with a chance, dependent on results elsewhere, to actually top the Champions League mega-table at this early stage.

Mainly this feels like a deeply Emery occasion. Not so much a homecoming; the Basque coastal town where he grew up is 350 miles northwest of here. As a player Emery never made it on to the pitch against Barça. But as a manager this has been an endlessly gruelling two-hander: 30 games across Almería, Valencia, Spartak Moscow, Sevilla, PSG and Villarreal, and an ongoing tale of sorrow, with 21 defeats and just three wins.

Not that you’d know it. Emery has always come here with teams that are punching up. He spoke on the eve of his latest return with a genuine conviction about learning from each of those occasions, focused as ever on the possibilities in front of him.

“These games gave me experience to learn, to get better, to intensify for the next matches I face. With the players we talked about our experiences together. We had our experience in Europe, two years ago, last year. This year we have won three matches and done fantastic work. Tomorrow we are facing one of the favourites to win the competition so we are going to face a huge challenge.”

The Camp Nou is still in a state of furious full-body renovation, surrounded by hoardings and railings and rubble-strewn strips of land, but inside the fixings are taking shape. The current team is also a high-functioning work in progress. La Masia continues to produce omni-talented high-technique teenagers. There is a slight, and understandable, sense of a soft centre at times. But also of fluent and dreamy possession football.

Villa will be aggressive, hard-pressing, geared to assert their physical advantages. Their captain, John McGinn, was sat next to his manager in the pop-up press conference room and revealed that he had been here only once before, as an eight-year-old on holiday the same day Ricardo Quaresma signed for Barcelona and had his unveiling at the stadium.

McGinn talked about his own journey alongside the Villa fans from the Championship to this elite stage. He praised Barcelona’s humility and work ethic. He also said Villa had the players to hurt them.

It is at last a fitting palate cleanser, a chance to move on from the dominant piece of Aston Villa news this so far week, which isn’t actually news or even really anything to do with Aston Villa.

There was a great deal of digital heat over the weekend at Jamie Carragher’s assertion there is “a food chain” in English football, that Aston Villa would naturally remain below Manchester United in this hierarchy, and as such Emery would always feel the need to climb to that higher level.

The only part of this statement that seems unarguably true is that Jamie Carragher doesn’t know how food chains work. In reality a food chain is mutable. This is not a fixed order. Dynamic population. Habitat shifts. Mutable omnivore status. The food chain is constantly rotating, overlapping, redefining itself.

A more accurate analogy would be that the Premier League is unlike a food chain, but is instead a place where money has created genuine stratification. On the other hand, is the thing Jamie Carragher thought he was saying even true?

Villa are pushing hard at the envelope. They’re in Barcelona. They have a proper manager, not Lee Hendrie or similar bringing the emergency DNA. Manchester United is an idea, beloved of legacy consumers, its footprint still vast, but a footprint in sands that are shifting and have shifted and will shift even faster and further.

For Barcelona, Dani Olmo, Andreas Christensen, Eric García and Xavi Espart are expected to miss the game, opening up a little potential defensive frailty. Nicholas Jackson is expected to be fit to start for Villa after playing 90 minutes at the weekend.