Aston Villa v West Ham post-match thread

[olaftab]

I agree that most teams should be able to cope with 30 mins or less when down to 10 but only if they have no interest in changing the prevailing score situation. West Ham did not and I also agree that with 11v11 they may well have gone on to win the game. I guess  West Ham are a good quality mature Premier League team and we obviously are not just now. This was very evident on how we played  v 10 and also by the fact we lost the Palace game.

[Mister E]

We need mobile quick forwards. We don’t have one at the club right now. Everything slows down and we get trapped at the edge of the box. It’s all very predictable. We fix the forward situation our defence will do the rest. It’s very good and getting better.

Wesley is mobile and quick: he lacks the support at the moment and releasing GJ and JM to get a little further forward would solve many of our frontline issues.

[Risso]

I think when we go for another striker we will go for better than Maupay

We didn't in the summer.

Well maybe we did, we were linked to a few players that I'd say are a level up from Maupay but none of them came to anything. Maybe they decided that they would only go for another forward if it was someone who would be a level above what we had and the options they found just weren't available or interested at the time. This is why I'd like to see us get away from the bottom 3 long before January. If we could go into that window sat in midtable and looking for a striker to challenge for Europe our options are much better than looking for someone to pull us out of the relegation battle.

You missed my point I think, in my opinion Wesley isn't as good as Maupay.

[john e]

I remember Grealish getting sent off at Forest with just 12 minutes to go and loads on here queing up to say he'd cost us the game

I think you can make the argument to suit whatever you want to believe

in my view it's what you make of it
when West Ham went down to 10 men with a good 25 minutes to play it presented a massive opportunity to go and win the game
It our fault we didn't not West Ham being good

[Dogtanian]

I remember Grealish getting sent off at Forest with just 12 minutes to go and loads on here queing up to say he'd cost us the game

I think you can make the argument to suit whatever you want to believe

in my view it's what you make of it
when West Ham went down to 10 men with a good 25 minutes to play it presented a massive opportunity to go and win the game
It our fault we didn't not West Ham being good

I think with the Forest game was that we were on the ascendancy at the time and looked like we were going to win it, but weren't the same once Jack was gone.

I agree that Monday was down to us, we could have won that game in the second half, but the lads will learn from that.

[john e]

I think when we go for another striker we will go for better than Maupay

We didn't in the summer.

Well maybe we did, we were linked to a few players that I'd say are a level up from Maupay but none of them came to anything. Maybe they decided that they would only go for another forward if it was someone who would be a level above what we had and the options they found just weren't available or interested at the time. This is why I'd like to see us get away from the bottom 3 long before January. If we could go into that window sat in midtable and looking for a striker to challenge for Europe our options are much better than looking for someone to pull us out of the relegation battle.

You missed my point I think, in my opinion Wesley isn't as good as Maupay.

personally I wouldn't swap

it's one of those where we can look back on in the future and see who called it right

[fbriai]

I wouldn't either, John. Think he'll grow into the team.

[paul_e]

I also think comparing Maupay in his 3rd season in England to Wesley in his 5th game is a touch early to call either of them better. Lets see how they're both doing by the January window.

[Nelly]

For what it's worth I thought we played well, without really playing well.

Lots of misplaced passes but we were on par with a team who are being tipped to finish 6-10 in the league this year. I read somewhere they have £100 million in their front three alone?

To create chances, dominate periods of play and generally compete well against that was fantastic and Lord knows, had Wesley buried that header from Grealish in the first half, or had El Ghazi managed to get to Jota's cross sooner than their keeper, we could quite easily have won this.

West Ham could have won it too, I don't mean to do them a disservice, but we weren't as bad as some are making out.

Our forward players and some of our midfield are still working out how to play together. I'm more confident that ever that it will come, especially off the back of this game.

Things to work on for me:

-Wesley needs to stop diving at every opportunity, stay on his feet and do more with the ball. He's clearly decent technically.

-We need to find ways through teams who are happy to defend against us. That's always hard though, even for the very best teams in the league.

[paul_e]

I think the biggest thing we need to work on is giving our players options. Too often there was only 1 pass on, which made us predictable.

[thick_mike]

I think the biggest thing we need to work on is giving our players options. Too often there was only 1 pass on, which made us predictable.

This^, all day this ^.

When teams lose confidence, players start hiding from the ball. Often a player is scapegoated for dwelling on the ball too long because there isn’t a pass on. I think Jack and Jota both suffered from this at various times in the game.

I’m not saying players are hiding, but they need to show more.

[Steve67]

I think the other thing we have to get used to, quickly, basing my point on the two posts above, is how quickly other teams press us.  West Ham were the more polished side with the ball, although they were a bit 'all fart and no shit' when it got to the edge of our area.  I want to see us go toe to toe with these teams and feel that our players did hide a bit on Monday.  One or two just were not good enough on the night, including AEG and Jota.  Wesley is a fine player but does some daft things.  I still think we need the extra player in the centre of the park as we were wide open at times and a better team would have battered us.