Martin O'Neill has promised Aston Villa's fans that the team will come good
Aug 24 2009 by Mathew Kendrick, Birmingham Mail
MARTIN O’Neill has attempted to quell the rising discontent ahead of tonight’s trip to Liverpool by urging fans to judge Villa after a dozen games.
Villa will arrive at Anfield on the back of a Premier League opening-day defeat to Wigan and a Europa League setback against Rapid Vienna.
O’Neill’s failure so far to strengthen the heart of Villa’s defence, and the two losses, have placed the manager under intense early-season pressure.
And Villa are anxious to win their first point of the campaign this evening at the scene of last season’s 5-0 thrashing against Rafa Benitez’s men.
“It’s early season, what you don’t want to do is get too far behind,” admitted O’Neill
“You want to get points on the board and that’s what we intend to do in our match against Liverpool. We’ll get going and we’ll be fine.
“Last season we missed a game early on and if you get drawn into that you can start looking at the league table when you are a game behind and the points tally maybe doesn’t look as rosy as it should.
“It will even itself up. After 12 games we will be in a position to make a proper assessment.”
O’Neill is refusing to panic about Villa’s first two results and insists it is only a matter of time before the players click into gear and start winning games.
“The games are hard and they’re approaching us pretty quickly as well which is good,” he said.
“But when we settle down in the season we’ll be absolutely fine.
“Of course we need to improve and keep on improving. As the whole squad gets fully wound up and fully fit then we will be okay.
“It’s a tough time at the start of the season. We had the Peace Cup and we had some players coming back later than others.
“I think other teams are feeling the same way. This is not putting an excuse on it, we’ve got to try and be ready for it.”
O’Neill witnessed Liverpool’s opening-day defeat at Tottenham but they bounced back emphatically to beat Stoke 4-0 in midweek and the Villa boss is expecting a tough challenge this evening.
“I went to the Liverpool-Tottenham game and Tottenham deserved to win,” he said.
