Ty Bracey: Aston Villa injuries don’t excuse inability to score goals
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…
The injury crisis at Aston Villa is “absolutely not” the reason that the club are struggling so much in attack, according to Ty Bracey.
So far this season Diego Carlos, Matty Cash, Boubacar Kamara, Lucas Digne, and now replacement Ludwig Augustinsson have been ruled out, to throw a significant spanner into the works for manager Steven Gerrard.
Yet despite all of those players’ duties being primarily defensive Bracey feels the Villans haven’t been too bad at the back, and doesn’t think the manager can use it as an excuse for the team being so toothless going forward.
Talking exclusively to Villa News he said: “We do have an injury issue, that’s completely right, but that’s predominantly on the left-back and right-back position.
“Exclude the goalkeeper, there’s still eight other places within the team.
“Defensively we don’t look too bad. Of course we want full strength with Lucas Digne and Matty Cash to come back, and Diego Carlos and Kamara, we do need them back.
“But we’re not looking overly terrible defensively. We’ve just got to do more going forward.
“We’ve got to score goals, and even when we had those players fit we didn’t really look like we were going to score goals.
“So does the injury problem help? No it doesn’t. But is that the reason why we’re not scoring goals? Absolutely not.
“When you take into account the fact that the highest starting player up the pitch who’s injured is Kamara, that’s a central defensive midfielder.
“Yeah the injuries don’t help but we’ve got to do more in the final third, we really have got to start firing.”
The full-backs do have a role in the attacking game, but 37-year-old Ashley Young has been somewhat of a revelation in relief there, and yet the attacking riches in this squad have been failing to fire on a regular basis all year, including when both Cash and Digne were on the pitch.
Gerrard needs to find answers soon because not only is it severely diminishing the ability to pick up results, it is making games that much harder to watch for the fans.
The Lions were too open last season, and a lot of focus has gone to addressing that issue. Despite the injuries it appears there has been some success on that front, but if it comes so heavily at the expense of the attacking output it really isn’t a viable solution.
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