Unai Emery has accepted the blame for any mistakes Arsenal make while playing out from the back and says he is open to a more flexible approach when the situation demands.

Arsenal will seek to end a run of three Premier League games without victory when Aston Villa visit the Emirates Stadium on Sunday, a statistic that hangs over them because of a disastrous second-half showing at Watford last weekend. They were 2-0 up before mistakes took hold and much of the debate afterwards surrounded the frequent losses of possession from their own goal-kicks, notably the disastrous pass from Sokratis Papastathopoulos that allowed Tom Cleverley to halve the deficit.

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Emery said his players were acting on instructions. “One mistake is not his mistake,” he said when asked if Papastathopoulos, who was left out of the squad that beat Eintracht Frankfurt 3-0 in the Europa League, needed a pick‑me-up after his error. “It is the mistake of all the team, and I am responsible because I decided to start like that.”

Emery described the Watford game as “maybe the worst in our buildup starting with the goalkeeper” and appeared to acknowledge that he and his team had not adapted to a change of tactics from the home side after half-time.

“In the first 45 minutes they didn’t push a lot or do a really big press against us,” he said. “We controlled the match with the ball, the possession, the buildup, easier in the first half. The second half changed because they needed to push more, to attack more, to go against us.”

Arsenal nonetheless failed to heed the warning last Sunday but their approach in Frankfurt was noticeably different, the second‑choice goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez showing no reluctance to clear the ball long against opponents who left sizeable gaps at the back.

“To build up with the goalkeeper and centre‑back is going to be our identity but we are going to share [that] sometimes with long balls,” Emery said. “For example, against Frankfurt we were different and decided more times to play a long ball, earn metres on the pitch and after that attack the space.

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“[Frankfurt] were very offensive, with a lot of players in the attacking third for pressing or to attack our space, and we needed to break that press. We did a lot with the long ball, because a lot of the time we had three against three in the attacking third. We decided, and we played with that gameplan.”

He said their approach against Villa would depend on the best way to overcome Dean Smith’s team and there are other issues to consider, too. If Mesut Özil was, as Emery said on Wednesday, rested from the Frankfurt game in order to keep him fresh then presumably the playmaker has a high chance of returning to the side. There may also be some temptation to test Bukayo Saka against top-flight opponents but Emery suggested Nicolas Pépé will make his fourth start. The club record signing has flickered so far; Emery and his staff are putting in extra work to integrate the £72m forward more quickly.

“He is playing well, but progressively we know there is going to be more performance in him to help us,” he said. “Now I want to do quickly [his] last step in the adaptation for us, for example against Aston Villa. After training we are watching individual videos with him to push him to achieve the tactical details we need for him. He is playing well but we need to be strong, with every player improving a lot.”