Dean Smith spoke to the media via a virtual press conference to preview Aston Villa’s trip to Chelsea.
The club’s head coach discussed the quick turnaround in matches over the festive period and assessing his squad, Villa’s defensive strength having kept four successive clean sheets, travelling to Stamford Bridge to face the Blues, ambitions for the season and more.
Here’s what he had to say…
On utilising his squad over the hectic festive period…
“We’ll have a look at the players, assess it, speak to them, chat with the performance team and see if there’s any players who need rotating.
“We feel our squad is deep enough, and that was proven with the Burnley game when we had four players making their first starts of the season. So we’ve got players capable of doing that.
“It’s not good that we’ve got Tyrone missing because it means we’ve got centre-halves who will have to play two games on the spin.
“But, all in all, I think the recovery the players have been doing and the work they’ve been doing, I’m not sure many of them would want to come out of the team at the moment.
“And that’s another important part of it as well.”
On Villa’s impressive defensive record…
“I think they take great pride in it.
“There’s a growing maturity within the squad, I like the fact Jack and Emi are arguing in the last minute (against Crystal Palace) when he’s got a goal-kick.
“Jack feels he should be kicking it one side and Emi feels he should be kicking it the other.
“But that’s what I want from the players, I want the team spirit to want to keep clean sheets and have a great pride in that.
“And I certainly think we’ve got that balance at the moment, which is good.”
On facing Chelsea…
“Chelsea have got very, very good players, we’ve seen with their acquisitions in the summer that we need to be at our best, we know what we’re coming up against.
“We’re coming up against a top-four team in the Premier League.
“We’ve got to be ready for that and ready to compete.
“If we see less of the ball then we’ve got to make sure we’re very good without the ball but when we win it back we’ve got to go and use it very well.”
On Villa’s ambitions this season…
“They (our ambitions) haven’t changed. Our ambitions at the start of the season were to go and be competitive in every game we play.
“Nobody was happy with finishing 17th last season and we wanted to improve on that.
“And we felt the players we brought in would certainly help improve us.
“We’re doing that at the moment, we’re progressing as a football club and we need to make sure we maintain that.”
You can watch Dean’s full video below…
