Dean Smith claims his Aston Villa side ‘will come back better’ after the November international break following a 1-0 defeat at Southampton. Villa have now lost five top-flight games in a row for the first time since 2016, as Tottenham, Wolves, Arsenal, West Ham and now Southampton have all condemned Smith’s team to defeat in recent weeks. An early first-half strike from Adam Armstrong was all that separated the two sides at St Mary’s, but Smith thought a draw would have been a fair result based on the balance of play.
Dean Smith said: “It became a tale of two halves. I thought Southampton controlled the midfield in the first half, but we controlled it in the second half, but sometimes you get kicked in the teeth and they scored a hell of a goal. I said to the players at half-time that you can’t feel like the world is against you, you’ve got to go out in the second-half and leave it all out on the pitch. I thought they did that in the second half, we just needed that quality in the final third.”
Villa couldn’t find a reply to Armstrong’s goal and Smith thought his side looked ‘anxious’ after conceding inside the first 15 minutes of a game for the fifth time this season.
Dean Smith said: “I don’t know if the goal knocked the stuffing out of us a little bit but I thought we started quite well, but then they were better on the ball than we was. We looked a bit anxious at times, we didn’t get the press right so we got the message on to the lads and it took until half-time to get it right, but when we did we looked a bit more organised. We felt like they were opening us up a little too much in their build-up and I think we did that better in the second half.”
Asked he was going to react to Villa’s seventh loss of the campaign,
Dean Smith replied: “I’m a scrapper, always have been. I’m disappointed we’ve lost five on the spin, but we’ve got players out injured – I think we had five players on the bench who are academy graduates. We need to work hard during the international break with the players that are there, a lot of them are going on international duty and get prepared for Brighton. We will be better when we come back.”
