Unai Emery said Tyrone Mings’s error will ‘never be repeated’ as Aston Villa’s Champions League bandwagon ground to an abrupt halt.
Villa’s boss was furious with the decision to award a penalty after the centre-half’s handball blunder that gifted Club Brugge a route to victory. Emery’s men were eyeing a fourth straight victory in the competition but the early second-half lapse put them on the back foot.
Mings mistakenly handled after Emi Martinez kicked the ball to him from a goal kick. It was similar to the incident of seven months ago at the Emirates when Arsenal defender Gabriel and David Raya so infuriated Thomas Tuchel.
Emery said: “This mistake is not going to be repeated again, I think never in my life, never again. We work to try to control games through keeping possession. We were always in position to recover - but this is a very strange mistake.”
The 52nd-minute controversy gave Bruges a foothold in the game and they fought for their lives to defend it.
Mings, who had already been booked for an elbow, was running the risk of a dismissal and fellow Villa defender Ezri Konsa said the referee should have sent him off if he thought the handball was deliberate.
He said: “I didn’t see it. But I saw their players running towards the ref saying: ‘Handball,’ and who knows? It’s just one of those. It killed the game.
“It was goalless and I think if it is a deliberate handball and he’s on a yellow already, why didn’t he send him off? It killed the game. It’s a mistake. It’s not a mistake we want to make but there’s nothing we can do now, we’ve got to move on from it.”
Bruges coach Nicky Hayen said: “For sure it was a penalty and we knew it immediately. He took the ball and pushed it back. In the end, it was a penalty. But if we had to concede something like that, it would have been very sour. It’s a small present that we will take on gladly.”