Soft Goals Cost Villa Again

Martin O’Neill said after our 2-1 defeat to Spurs: ‘We must stop conceding soft goals.’

England striker and often talked about Villa target Jermain Defoe scored two before Gareth Barry gave Villa some hope on the 81st minute.

O’Neill said after the game: ‘We were always in the game today, but we conceded two soft goals – particularly the second – and that cost us dear. I want to see us making team work harder to score against us. The second goal was just a long ball flicked on and before you knew it, it was in the back of the net. That sort of thing is hard to take after you’ve seen the players work so hard. I thought we did well at times today, but we gave ourselves a lot to do.’

More worryingly Olof Mellberg and Aaron Hughes had to go off injured which doesn’t exactly bode well for the rest of the Christmas and New Year fixtures. Stiliyan Petrov also came off in the 46th minute, by the text I’ve seen it says that was tactical, hopefully that was due to another no show performance? I’d have thought it was more likely to have been an injury substitution judging by what the Villa boss said,

O’Neill continued: ‘The injuries didn’t really help us, but I’m not making excuses, just stating a fact. Chris Sutton was suffering from blurred vision and then we lost three players in the first-half. You have to deal with these things and I thought, even after the changes, we gave a good account of ourselves. We went two down but never stopped working and Gareth got us back into it. At the end the Spurs bench were screaming at their players to get it into the corner. But we can’t hide from the fact that this was another defeat and the players have to step up to the plate at Charlton on Saturday.’