Villa Lack Killer Touch

Gareth Barry says the draws are what have killed Villa’s season as we’ve not been able to kill off teams.

The Villa skipper said on the official site:

‘Our home results have been really frustrating – we’ve had too many draws. If we could have turned two or three of those draws into wins, we’d find ourselves challenging for a European spot. But that’s football; we need to start stringing wins together. We need to put home wins with the away wins and that’s what we’ll be looking to do next season.’

On the Portsmouth draw he added, ‘Sunday was frustrating for us. They got men behind the ball and made it tough for us. We felt we were the team that was going to go on and win it, but David James came in and made a couple of world-class saves to keep them in it. It was harder because we felt we were the only team trying to win it. That can be hard for any team and we just couldn’t get a breakthrough.’

‘That’s happened a few times at home this season and it’s hard to say why. We scored three goals at Middlesbrough the week before and our confidence was high going into the game.’

And on this weekends visit to our bogey team Manchester City, and the former Villan who always scores against us, Barry says they have to watch Darius Vassell because he raises his game against the Villa.

‘It’s always a tough game and they’ve been a bit of a bogey team for us over the years, but we’ll go there in good spirits after winning two away games in a row. The City of Manchester Stadium hasn’t been great for us (hasn’t been great for the Citeh fans either, its got no atmosphere and lacks the ‘home’ feel of Maine Road), but this is the right time to go there. We’re full of confidence – we’ve gone six games unbeaten now, so there’s no reason why we can’t go and get another win.’

Barry is in the race for top scorer with Gabriel Agbonlahor, ‘I’m in the running with Gabby for the top scorer. We’ve got nine apiece now, so hopefully we can both add another couple to that. I’ve not scored since December, but Gabby has been on a good run and he was unlucky not to get another goal against Portsmouth.’

Barry and Gabby are both on 8 goals in the Prem and 1 goal each in the Carling Cup. Ashley Young has 4 prem and 1 cup goal. Luke Moore has 3 league goals. John Carew and Stiliyan Petrov both have 2. No wonder we’ve not killed games off with that record for our top scorers!