Tough games to come for Aston Villa and some statistics

There appears to be a running joke at the moment; we play long passes, not long ball football. I know, but whatever way you want to look at it, we lost yesterday and it isn't nice.

I know it's tough to look at an individual statistic and use that to sum up the match and it would be easy for me to look at the season to date and tell you that of the twenty teams in the Premier League, we're very close to the bottom in terms of possession.

But it isn't just that we had 37% of the ball yesterday. It's that Spurs had three times as many shots on target and twice as many successful passes as us.

But shall I tell you the one thing that pisses me off more than anything; it's when Brad Guzan gets the ball and he hits it long. That isn't a pass, that's a long ball and when he launches it like that, it becomes a 50/50 and it is that thinking that is wrong with our game.

We might be 13th and only six points from the top four but we're also only three points from the bottom three. We need to find the form that we played towards the end of last season and that was very much focused on keeping the ball.

We've got a tough set of fixtures coming up. The likes of Everton, West Ham and Cardiff are not easy and then we've got West Brom, Sunderland and Southampton.

These next six games are going to be very important and we can't afford to be giving some of those sides too much time on the ball.

And I'm confident it will come good again, but it is frustrating that it is taking this long and it's annoying that the basics are not getting done the right way.

Football isn't a difficult game and when you allow the opposition the time and space to come into your own half, you're inviting pressure.

The players

Guzan, Bacuna, Luna, Westwood, Vlaar, Baker, El Ahmadi (Sylla - 72' ), Delph, Kozák (Benteke - 61' ), Weimann and Gabby (Tonev - 79' ).

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