Aston Villa fell to a 3-0 defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday night despite Dean Smith’s side impressing for large parts of the game. The Villa boss might have lost Jack Grealish for £100million this summer, but he believes that Villa are now stronger without their former talisman.
Dean Smith said: “I feel like we have a better squad of players this season. The depth we have now and the talent we have allows us to play in Chelsea’s half and that’s what we want to do. We know that the way they play, they want to play through the sixes and 10s and we wanted to win the ball in their half and we did that and created some opportunities from that, as well as our set-pieces. I believe that with this group of players and the players that we’ve got, the Argentinians coming back and other coming back, we can actually go toe to toe with these teams now, whereas two years we couldn’t.”
