Aston Villa boss has praised his new set piece coach in the team who has been working well so far.

Aston Villa was slightly in a limbo last summer due to losing a number of their spine players. Not only their stars who left the club but also their mastermind in their secret weapon. Their set piece coach who contributed heavily on their success in the past few years, Austin MacPhee, made a shocking decision by departing from Villa Park too. His contract which had two years left plus its release clause was met by Chelsea.

The Lions eventually managed to find the replacement. He is the set piece coach in Norway national team, Pal Fjelde. Unai Emery has recently shared his view on his new backroom staff during the press conference, as reported in insidefutbol.

“Pal is a fantastic guy. He joined us in the summer and he is progressively working on our idea to build set-pieces, trying to get through it as well and a good performance.”

Emery’s hope on Fjelde

Emery certainly hopes that Fjelde would turn to be a high profile set piece expert like his predecessor. Such definitely takes time, despite his experience at the top level already with Norway national team and Burnley.

Villa boss is aware of such. His work in both teams was statistically still far below from MacPhee’s. The Scotsman is clearly more experienced with longer list of teams to have worked with. Thus, Emery is pleased and hopeful he could improve with the Lions.

“I am so, so happy with him, and we are sharing a lot, having a lot of conversations and meetings.He is young, but he has a good trajectory as a player first with set-pieces, and now, as an assistant coach, he is a very good guy and very good professional. Hopefully we can do a lot of good things together.”

Fjelde’s work so far

The 32-year old set piece coach has not seen his work making dominance in breaking the deadlock yet, as his predecessor did. So far this season, Villa has just netted three times through dead ball situation, one in EFL League Cup against Coventry City and two yesterday against his former side, Viking Stavanger.

The first one versus Frank Lampard’s man was the second goal through a Ross Barkley’s header. He headed home following the corner kick taken by Ibrahim Mbaye. The Senegalese winger also became executor in the corner kick for Barkley’s goal in the Viking win yesterday too. Both were involved in the same set piece scenario for Villa’s opener in the first half. Another one was through a penalty, which Buendia scored before the interval too.