Aston Villa boss Unai Emery was unsurprisingly disappointed and frustrated after our loss to Leicester City, but remains optimistic overall.
Villa came into this encounter in good form, but unfortunately our impressive run of results came to an end as we suffered a 4-2 defeat at Villa Park on Saturday afternoon.
READ MORE: Five key talking points as Villa suffer disappointing defeat vs Leicester
Defensively, we simply weren’t good enough. Whether it was glaring mistakes like the one which led to the first goal for the visitors, or our general defensive performance as a unit as it was far too easy to cut through us throughout, conceding three goals at home in 45 minutes isn’t acceptable.
Emery and the players will be fully aware of that no doubt, and to add to our frustration it really felt as though we should have come away with three points given our impressive play at times. However, those mistakes led to our downfall and after failing to be clinical enough in the second half, we’re now left to rue a frustrating defeat.
As ever, Emery was honest and forthcoming in his assessment of the game, as he didn’t hide his thoughts on how we played and where it went wrong for us.
“I’m really disappointed today,” he said, as per Villa TV. “We were taking good victories and sharing good moments with our supporters, but the balance today wasn’t good. At home, I want to try to transmit and connect with our supporters. We started very well, we started connecting with them and scoring a goal, but we made big mistakes.
“In the Premier League, every team has very good players and they can take good chances if we make mistakes like we did tonight.
“We are disappointed and frustrated as well because in the second half we had chances to score and change things, but we couldn’t do it.”
While that encompassed the general feeling coming away from that game well, Emery was still positive and optimistic about what we’ve done in the last few months, and about the improvement we’ve made.
However, as always, he was quick to re-emphasise the importance of continuing to demand more of ourselves and to improve further, and we’ll no doubt learn from our mistakes in this encounter and strive to avoid repeating them.
Villa do face a difficult run of fixtures now with Man City, Arsenal and Everton up next, and so we’ll have to learn quickly and get back to the defensive solidity we showed prior to this game and get back to winning ways as soon as possible.
As noted by Emery below, we also missed out on an opportunity to move into the top half of the Premier League table with a win, and so our reaction to this setback will be crucial now as we hopefully waste no time in bouncing back and can show our quality again next Sunday.
“Today we lost but two months ago we were at the bottom of the table and we were thinking at the beginning to stay in the Premier League,” he added. “We had the opportunity to win today and go into the top ten teams, but it was an opportunity lost.
“Now, we have to react quickly, analyse the match and try to improve on the mistakes we made.
“Overall, what we are doing continues to be positive. We have to be very demanding of ourselves to improve.”
