What Unai Emery did before the end of Premier League draw at Sunderland shows that Aston Villa are in trouble

If the message is not to panic, it’s a message that has to be communicated and acted upon from the top.

Aston Villa are in historically bad form. With three points banked from a possible 15, no wins in the Premier League and an early exit from the League Cup, it’s inevitable and entirely justified that Unai Emery and his players will have to do a certain amount of facing the music.

Sunday’s draw at Sunderland was another appalling performance from a team that’s quite obviously struggling. They need their manager to find solutions. They need him to take a few of them out of the firing line, to give a few of the fringe players a chance to prove they can shake things up, to recognise that his plan is not working.

More to the point, they need him to understand that his plan is not going to work, not without fundamental adjustments that just don’t seem to be forthcoming.

Villa are five games into the new season and they need to front up to their shortcomings. The players need to show some character, to be braver, to have the professional wherewithal to be better.

They need the same from Emery. The Villa boss should be the man charged with levelling out the mood and making sure his players are affected as little as possible by the negativity around the club. They’re not impervious to it – nobody would be – but part of the job of the manager is to take the edge off that and sent the team out believe they can win.

His reaction to more dropped points, this time throwing away a lead against a newly promoted team that had a player sent off in the first half, was the last thing Villa needed at the end of another dreadful day.

Emery ducked the moment after another dismal draw

With a few seconds of added time left at the Stadium Light, Emery shook the hand of Sunderland manager Régis Le Bris and left the scene. He was already in the tunnel when the final whistle was blown.

It might not seem like much but it was an admission that the form of the team is getting to him in a way that he doesn’t know how to correct, and that panic isn’t just the domain of those of us on the outside.

There are lots of reasons to call Emery out for his action at the end of the game. Leaving his players to face the final whistle without him is symbolically divisive. It draws a line between the manager and his team whether it was intended or not, and it reveals a lack of composure that Villa supporters could really have done without seeing.

In my opinion, it’s also an unnecessary show of disrespect to Le Bris and Sunderland, but I’m not in the business of feeling disrespected on behalf of other people.

I’m a Villa fan. I want to feel like Villa have this abysmal situation under control. In the space of about five minutes before the end of another performance that would have looked subpar in the Championship, Emery convinced me that they don’t.

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