New manager bounces so very often prove deceptive, but Emery and Villa are an enticing combination

Have to be careful with new-manager bounces. They can be hugely beguiling and concoct an easy narrative while actually being entirely illusory. There’s a reason their name has become a cliche, and the implication of a bounce is itself inherent. A short-lived gravity-defying lift that must soon be brought back to reality and the accepted order of things.

But balls to all that, because the Unai Emery new manager bounce at Aston Villa is already such a compelling one. Victory over Manchester United caught the eye, but the character and quality of football in evidence in victory from behind at Brighton says even more. It’s easy, unprovable and yet utterly 100 per cent undeniably true that Villa simply wouldn’t have won this game a couple of weeks ago.

Brighton had lost only once at home this season, narrowly and unfortunately to Spurs, and Villa were without an away win all season until today.

What’s also key to this is that Brighton played well too. This was a fine game of football between a Brighton side that has long been among the more watchable among the great mid-table morass of Barclays and a Villa side that at the very, very least is now going to join Brighton in that group.

Villa can be rightly pleased with a hard-earned win at a difficult ground and on a weekend unlike any other in Premier League history, where everyone knows that the outcome of this specific game is going to impact the mood around the club for the next month and a half. But Brighton shouldn’t let doom and gloom descend after this either.

It was a keenly contested game so even that even the key moments existed as mirror images of each other. Both teams are still learning on the job with their relatively new managers’ desire to play out from the back and both teams were duly instructed to press the other high up the field. It gave the whole game an intoxicating high-wire element that meant nothing ever felt entirely certain.

That Brighton’s first-minute opener came from Alexis Mac Allister pressing and robbing Douglas Luiz and Villa’s second-half winner came from Douglas Luiz pressing and robbing Alexis Mac Allister felt apt. Throw in the fact that Villa’s other goal was a penalty and Brighton were bizarrely denied one of their own when a dawdling Lucas Digne attempted to kick the ball but managed instead to only plant his boot hard into Solly March’s calf, and the closeness of the game is brought into ever sharper focus.

But Villa closed the game out pretty…