Villa welcomes Spurs to Villa Park for a monumental battle in the race for top four and guaranteed UEFA Champions League football next season.

Victory for Unai Emery’s men would tighten their grip on fourth place by giving them an eight-point lead over Spurs, but defeat would see Ange Postecoglou's side cut the gap to two points with a game in hand.

With Villa never having qualified for the UEFA Champions League, McGinn knows the importance of the match.

“Everyone knows how important the game is,” he said. “It’s probably, in a league fixture, the most important game in the club’s recent history.

“So the players are aware of that. If I feel over the next couple of days that the boys are not aware, I’ll remind them.

“The supporters will be right up for it and we need to remember that so will Tottenham. We got away with one down at Tottenham Stadium.

“They’re a really good team who we’ll fully respect. But we know at Villa Park we’re a force and hopefully we can get three points.”

Villa won the European Cup in 1982 but has never played in the modern UEFA Champions League.

McGinn admits his side is talking about the possibility of qualifying and knows they have it in their own hands.

“We speak about it, we are ambitious,” McGinn added.

“Obviously we want to achieve something that the club haven’t achieved in a long, long time. Our focus from last year was to try to improve and be competitive in this competition which we’ve done so far.

“Try to improve, get [UEFA] Europa League and then maybe try and get the Champions League. We know it’s in our hands at the moment and we’ve got a really exciting run of games.

“There’s a lot of us that have been through the journey with the club so we’ve experienced the lows and the highs are hopefully still to come.”