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Unai Emery has said Tyrone Mings’ calamitous gaffe which condemned Aston Villa to Champions League defeat at Club Brugge was the biggest mistake he has witnessed in his managerial career.
The centre-back inexplicably picked up a short goal-kick by Emiliano Martinez without knowing referee Tobias Stieler had restarted the game.
Brugge captain Hans Vanaken converted the resulting 52nd-minute penalty to earn a 1-0 victory for the Belgian champions and end Villa’s three-game winning start to life in the Champions League.
It was a moment of madness by Mings, making his first start in the competition, but he may feel hard done by as Arsenal defender Gabriel was spared in the exact same circumstances against Bayern Munich in last season’s quarter-final.
On that occasion Swedish referee Glenn Nyberg did not penalise, saying it was a “kid’s mistake” and not in the spirit of the game to award a penalty.
Stieler did not have the same outlook and Mings was punished.
“His mistake is completely strange,” Emery said. “It’s the biggest mistake I witnessed in my career.
“We can make a mistake in the build up, we work to try and control the games through keeping possession and trying to stop the possession and we did that in the first half fantastic.
“We lost one or two balls, but we were always in the position to recover, but this mistake is very, very strange. It’s not for Mings or Martinez, it’s one mistake that’s strange. It’s only happened one time in all my life.”
The incident will divert attention from what was a below-par performance by Emery’s men, who have now lost their last three games in all competitions.
Emery insisted it was not a lack of intensity but such defeats are par for the course in European competition.
“I don’t know if it was intensity. It was a mistake,” he said. “The first half we played like we were planning. We had two chances, we had some corners and didn’t concede a corner from them.
“We didn’t let them play in transition, we didn’t make mistakes. The second half after the goal… it’s Europe. I have played in Europe for 16 years in a row.
“This situation I had before, not a mistake like that, but I had before. I know the difficulties we are going to face. We have experiences and I told them that the most important thing is the experiences we are having.
“Last year we lost to Warsaw, Zrinjski we drew, we deserved to lose at Ajax and we lost to Lille. It is difficult and here it is not strange. You watched the match and them playing, they finished exhausted. It was not intensity, the match changed completely after our mistake.”
The Belgian champions beat English opposition for the first time to boost their chances of qualifying for the last 16 play-off round.
Coach Nicky Hayen, whose last job was at Welsh Premier side Haverfordwest, said the penalty was the right decision.
“For sure it was a penalty and we knew it immediately,” he said. “He took the ball and played it back and didn’t notice it.
“In the end it’s a penalty. If we had to concede something like that it would have been very sour. A small present we take on gladly and it gives us six points.”
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