Aston Villa boss Unai Emery conceded that both he and his players were left disappointed and frustrated after our 1-0 defeat to Brentford.
Dango Ouattara’s effort in the 12th minute was all that split the two sides, as it was another dire performance from Villa on the whole that lacked creativity, pace and quality in the final third.
READ MORE: Ex-Villa ace posts classy farewell message after exit confirmed
While Emery saw his team dominate possession and try to build sustained pressure, there was no cutting edge or clinical play where it mattered on the pitch to make a decisive impact and find a breakthrough.
In turn, it’s a second consecutive week in which we’ve failed to show enough going forward, and that will be a concern for the Villa boss, as there was also a worrying lack of intensity, energy and impetus for large periods too as we failed to really test a Brentford side who were heavily beaten last time out.
“We are going to try and recover first mentally and continue working,” Emery said, as quoted by BBC Sport.
“We reacted well to going behind, we created chances but didn’t score. There are some things tactically we need to improve. In the first half and second half we had chances to score. We had corners and we had a lot of crosses.
***“Yes, it was a clear mistake [for the goal]. We are not like we want. Today we are very disappointed with the result.***“
After holding out for a goalless draw with Newcastle United last weekend, it’s not the start to the new Premier League season that Villa would have been hoping for, and the visit of Crystal Palace next up, against whom we’ve struggled in recent times, will add to the anxious feeling around the squad at the moment.
Question marks can arguably be raised over some of the decisions from Emery in terms of his starting line-up as Youri Tielemans was once again deployed in an advanced role while Tyrone Mings and Pau Torres partnered each other in the heart of the backline for the first time.
Emery was clearly unhappy with how we performed though, but it will be down to him to get the necessary reaction from his players in training this week to ensure that we improve, and do so quickly in order to avoid losing too much ground on our rivals so early in the campaign.
“We are frustrated,” Emery later added, when speaking to VillaTV. “We lost one match when in the first 20 minutes we were not starting like we needed to control the game, and we conceded one goal.
“We reacted and we dominated. We were having corners, we had some chances to score one goal to draw and then to start our own match, thinking to win.
“We didn’t score and we tried everything. We need to work and keep going forward with this result being very, very disappointing for us.
“We are in the process of building the team for different circumstances.
“We competed very well in the first match against Newcastle and today we competed after we conceded one goal, and it wasn’t enough to score one goal and draw.
“Now, the idea is try to move on, try to prepare the next game at home in Villa Park against Crystal Palace and try to react and get a better performance individually and collectively.
“We want to get stronger in the idea we were creating in the last years.”
Time will tell if there is any movement in the transfer market as Villa are clearly short of players in key areas, and there is a feeling that if we don’t step up our push to bring in reinforcements, we could be left short for the season and risk our struggles continuing.
Want more Villa analysis? TalkVilla+ has now launched! Subscribe below for ad-free newsletters, exclusive articles and much more. The TalkVilla podcast is also now live, have a listen, and subscribe if you enjoy on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. UTV!