Dean Smith lamented Aston Villa for “throwing away points” against Sheffield United after the Blades held on for a 1-0 victory.
Dean Smith said: “It was a very, very frustrating game from our point of view. We had the best chances in the first half and ended up going in a goal down. I can’t remember Emi (Martinez) being worked at all throughout the game, in all honesty, and then we conceded a really poor goal. McGoldrick switches the play from the halfway line and we don’t follow him. I think he runs off the back of John McGinn and then Elmo attempts to let the ball run out of play not knowing he was behind him. It was a really soft knowing we were a goal down in a game that we were on top of. In the second half we started really well; we were crisper on the ball and had a couple of half chances and the big change in the game was the sending off. For 35 minutes we were camped in their final third but we never showed enough quality on the ball or with our runs to make that count. The chances we had were made by the players themselves; from Bert (Traore) and Ezri Konsa. With the quality of players we had out there we should have created more.”
Dean Smith added: “We shouldn’t be leaving with nothing. We threw points away tonight with a sloppy goal where we should have never been behind in the first half. We feel like we’ve given points away. For all of the possession in the final third we needed better quality, better runs and better balls in but, for me, we tried to get the goal back inside the first five minutes after the sending off instead of being patient, pulling them out and finding holes. Listen, if we take our big chances today we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We didn’t take them today. They went down to 10 men and had everyone inside their 18-yard box and were hard to break down. I have no worries about us scoring goals, that’s for sure.”
Dean Smith named an unchanged team following the weekend’s win at Leeds and, when asked about his selection,
Dean Smith said: “We’ve had three days in between the games so there’s enough recovery period for the players to go again. I thought it would have been a similar game (to Leeds) where we had to be good at second balls and I thought we done that quite well. But, like I’ve said, we weren’t as crisp on the ball and it’s all about chances and we didn’t take them. They didn’t really have any.”
United’s David McGoldrick scored the only goal of the game just after the half-hour mark with Villa failing to break down 10 men following Phil Jagielka’s 57th-minute sending off. Dissecting Villa’s defeat at the hands of the Premier League’s bottom club.
