Disappointed Dean Smith felt his Aston Villa side could feel hard done by having been beaten 3-0 at Chelsea and can take a lot of belief from the manner of the performance.
Villa more than held their own against the Blues at Stamford Bridge and could feel unfortunate having been undone by a Romelu Lukaku brace, the second in injury time, and Mateo Kovacic’s effort after a defensive mix-up.
Head coach Smith was proud of his players for the way in which they played and asked questions of a Chelsea side who are reigning Champions League and Super Cup champions.
Speaking to VillaTV post-match, he said: “I’m really disappointed with the result, I feel it was an unjust scoreline.
“We executed the gameplan perfectly for 48 minutes and unfortunately we made a big mistake to give up the second goal and it became tough from there, against a team as good as they are.
“Football is about moments at times and we didn’t take our moments and their £96million striker took theirs.”
Smith added: “As I say, we had a gameplan, I feel and we all feel now that we’ve got a belief in this group of players, the squad of players we’ve got, that we don’t have to now come to Chelsea and try to not get beat, play in our half and play on the counter-attack.
“We can now go toe-to-toe with the quality and the athleticism we have in our team.
“Unfortunately we got caught, I think it was Kovacic who skipped two tackles and put Lukaku in and we never got back around on cover to delay and we go a goal down.
“Our response to that was superb, some of the quality of the football was excellent, the thing that was missing for us was the moment in their penalty box.
“We had a few of them, whether it be in general play, in transition or set-pieces.
“The second goal takes the wind out of everybody's sails a little bit.
“It allows a team full of top-quality players to open the pitch up, keep the ball and make it really difficult for us to go and press with the same endeavour as we did in the first half.”
You can watch Dean's full interview below...
