Eddie Howe doesn’t want to spend time over analysing today’s defeat and expects that Newcastle United will move on quickly after today’s poor performance.
Newcastle fell to only their fourth Premier League defeat of the season at Villa Park this afternoon, but it’s not the defeat that hurts so much, it’s the manner of it which is the problem.
Aston Villa dominated the game from start to finish, they were better in every area of the pitch. Newcastle looked lethargic and lacking in ideas, however Eddie Howe doesn’t feel it’s one to dwell on.
Howe wants to put this one behind us and move on
Speaking to BT Sport at full-time, Howe said: “It’s one of those performances for us we need to analyse and move on quite quickly.
“Aston Villa played very well today and I have to give them a lot of credit but by our own high standards, we were probably off it in every discipline of the game and when that’s the case you’re never going to win.
“We had our moments as we do because we’ve got good players, but no we weren’t at our best today.
“We tried to make changes to try and get a grip on the game, but nothing really turned the force our way.
“Our performance was very unlike us I’d say in general this performance.
“I think we tried to make substitutes to impact the game. I think tactically it left us a little bit more open and they punished.”
Howe also mentioned that games are coming thick and fast as the season draws to a close so there’s no time to sit and dwell on the performance too much, they just need to look at what went wrong and move on.
Aston Villa deserved their win, but Newcastle were so far off the pace
Just as well really, because there’s only a week until the next game and that’s not enough time to analyse just how poor we were today.
That’s two poor performances in a row now, though. Granted we were able to turn it around at Brentford, but the first half of that game looked very similar to today’s performance. Last week they had the excuse of three games in six days, but they’ve had a week to prepare for this one, so what went wrong?
Not to take anything away from Aston Villa, they were phenomenal and fully deserved their win. The referee was awful too, but we can’t even blame him. The free kicks he gave Villa and the ones he didn’t give us were all in positions that wouldn’t have led to anything overly dangerous other than the changeover in possession.
As Howe said, we just have to put this one behind us and move on quickly. Very quickly.
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