Ty Bracey exclusive: Aston Villa must stop dropping winnable points this season to progress
We’re delighted to welcome Villa View host Ty Bracey as our exclusive Aston Villa columnist each week he’ll be giving his views on the biggest talking points at the club…
If Aston Villa harbour real ambitions to make it into the top half of the league they have to win the types of games they’ve lost so far says Ty Bracey.
A very flat loss at newly-promoted Bournemouth on the opening day and a bad defeat at Crystal Palace last week have brought the club back to earth with somewhat of a thud after expectations were raised significantly by the summer transfer business.
Any team can lose a game but Bracey is worried that those ones came from performances that displayed no identity, and with a cluster of closely matched teams below the European places he believes the Villans have to make sure they win such games to push through that group.
Speaking exclusively to Villa News about the start of the season he said: “They were realistically three games we could have got nine points from. In the Everton game I think we were strong until we conceded the own goal. We were strong until then and then we wobbled.
“I was happy with the performance against Everton but the other two games were ones we realistically could have got points from.
“Again, it falls into the category of if we are going to climb up that Premier League table they’re the games we have to be getting the points from and I think it’s important that we do that. They are the difference.
“It’s so close between ninth place and 14th place. There isn’t a huge gap in those places, there really isn’t, and six to nine points is the difference between 14th and 11th.
“So they’re the ones where you really, really need to be winning those games, and it’s important that you do that.
“It isn’t that I necessarily expected us to have a bad start but they are fixtures where you’d expect us to at least put a shift in.
“I’m happy for us to lose games if we look like we’ve tried, but in two of those three games there wasn’t really an identity where we looked like we had any chance of creating anything.
“It’s just very frustrating football to watch.”
The least fans ask for is a concerted attempt by the team to win every game they play even if they don’t actually succeed in that, so when bad results are matched with bad performances it is obviously going to be thoroughly disappointing, especially to start a season which has promised much.
There is still plenty of time to turn things around, and a victory at Villa Park over West Ham on Sunday (28 August), who are in the midst of an even more disastrous start to the season without so much as a goal let alone a point in the league, would be a very good place to start.
In other Aston Villa news, Bracey would love to see the Villans mount a cup run this year after they overcame Bolton in the Carabao Cup in midweek.