Aston Villa’s promotion hopes suffered a huge blow over this past week following back-to-back defeats.
Kevin Phillips criticised Steve Bruce for his failure to rotate his Aston Villa team over this past week, when writing his regular column for the Express & Star.
The Villans currently sit in fourth position in the Championship table, seven points adrift of second placed Cardiff City, having played a game more than Neil Warnock’s men.
Steve Bruce’s side have just eight league games remaining, and they cannot afford to drop any more points, if they harbour genuine ambitions of finishing inside the top two.
It is hard to criticise Villa, considering the fact that they had lost just one league game since Boxing Day, before their back-to-back defeats to Queens Park Rangers and Bolton Wanderers over this past week.
Phillips, though, pinpointed Bruce’s lack of rotation for his side’s last two games as a major contributing factor behind their consecutive losses, when writing his regular column for the Express & Star:
“Bruce suggested he perhaps should have changed two or three players in the midweek fixture against QPR. It’s not a young squad he’s got there and he probably should have freshened it up. We’ve had that at Derby this season, a lot of these things become apparent after the event. It’s easily done – you come off the back of a fantastic result, you pick the same team and say ‘go on lads, do it again’. But so many times it doesn’t happen and credit to Steve, he came out and took the blame.”
Villa return to action on March 31st with a trip to Hull City, before they play host to Reading three days later, and nothing less than six points from those outings will do, if they are to have any chance of finishing inside the top two.
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