Hindsight Is A Beautiful Thing – Stuck In First Gear

Aston Villa manager Steve Bruce has held his hands up to not freshening the group up for the visit of Queens Park Rangers yesterday evening.

Hosting the struggling side at Villa Park for the game, Ian Holloway’s boys comfortably tonked us three one on the day with James Chester’s 88th minute effort nothing more than a consolation.

Following the high of victory over Wolverhampton Wanderers, it’s good to know the Aston Villa we all know and love is still alive under there as we fell to defeat in predictably idiotic style.

Speaking to the Official Site as he met with the media following the game, a downbeat Brucie explained.

‘It was a tough evening. We didn`t get going, right from the first minute, which was disappointing. In the back of my mind was ‘after the lord mayor`s show`. How often have we seen it?’

Acknowledging his own mistake.

‘I was toying with the idea of freshening us up to give us fresh legs and fresh energy, right from Saturday night. I decided against it. In hindsight, my experience should have told me with three games in six days, especially with what happened at the weekend, to bring in fresh legs. Unfortunately, that might have been the way forward.’

Rock and hard place. Change a winning team, especially winning in Wolves fashion and lose you carry the can. Don’t change and you still carry the can.

The one thing Bruce could’ve done was make half time changes and he didn’t – our first switching coming ten minutes after the restart and again with the benefit of hindsight he gave a nod to that in explaining that from the first minute the ‘intensity’ wasn’t there and we were consistently ‘flat’ and once QPR took the lead it was going to be long night.

Half time changes may have stemmed that and given us some impetus?

He was quick to point out that despite the leggy display he felt the players ‘chased and never gave up’ but we were obviously lacking the fresh quality needed to change a game and describing their third effort as ‘awful to give away’ and ‘that’s something out of the dark ages that I thought we had eradicated’ that kind of summed up the night in a sentence.

So it’s a case of back to where we were with chasing down Wolves, and now Cardiff have opened up a greater gap as well. The chase for automatic promotion isn’t over, but it would take a brave individual to put money on top spot now.