Morten Jensen walked out of Villa Park on Wednesday night thinking less about the scoreline than about the strip of grass between his technical area and the one Unai Emery was pacing.

The two dugouts sat about a metre apart. For a visiting coach stepping into an English Premier League ground on a Champions League night, that felt tighter than anything the Viking manager had worked with in Norway.

“No, I have not experienced that before,” Jensen told NRK, describing the setup as closer than any Norwegian ground he had been in and saying the two coaching staffs ended up standing on top of each other.

Emery was the other half of that cramped scene.

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“He was very intense,” Jensen said of the Spaniard.

The rule book UEFA never wrote

Jensen’s observation points at something the competition rulebook does not actually settle. There is no fixed minimum distance between the home and away benches in UEFA’s regulations, and NRK’s football expert Carl-Erik Torp said he found that surprising.

“I actually find it strange that no stricter demands are made on the distance. There are detailed rules for absolutely everything in top-flight football,” Torp said.

Torp put the gap between the actual coaching staffs at around half a metre, close enough that every word spoken on one bench carries straight to the other.

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A one-sided first half in Birmingham

Villa dominated the game before Viking showed signs of life after the break. Ross Barkley headed in from a corner on 23 minutes and Emiliano Buendía converted a penalty before Henrik Heggheim’s own goal, following an attacking run from Alysson, made it 3-0 in the second half. Peter Christiansen pulled one back with a late volley.

Jensen was unsparing about the opening 45 minutes.

“We were not Viking in the first half, neither offensively nor defensively,” he told VG.

“We had too much respect for them and became underdogs in certain duels.”

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The win made it three from three for Villa in the Champions League league phase, with Sky Sports noting Villa are now the second-fastest team ever to reach 20 European Cup wins, in 30 matches, behind only Real Madrid’s 29.

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