Villa need to do better - O’Neill

Nov 23 2009 by Mathew Kendrick, Birmingham Mail

MARTIN O’Neill believes Villa’s point at Burnley was “well merited” but he refused to excuse their below-par first-half performance.

After trailing to Steven Caldwell’s early header, O’Neill’s men improved slightly after the break and Emile Heskey headed a late leveller.

“I think that on our second-half performance we deserved it,” said the Villa boss. “We were stodgy in the first half and we had no reason to be because we were coming off the back of a really great win.

“I know that confidence around Turf Moor at the moment is very high with their performances, particularly at home.

“I thought that Burnley adjusted much better to the conditions in the first half than we did. They got the goal and it was not the best goal from our viewpoint and it knocked us back a little bit.

“We just didn’t get going at all until the second half, but overall I thought the point was well merited.”

There was hint of offside about Burnley’s goal, but O’Neill’s only complaint was that Brad Friedel and Richard Dunne did not defend it better. “It’s a goal,” he admitted.

“I didn’t see an awful lot of us complaining about whether it was offside. If I see it back and it’s offside then off course I’m going to vomit.

“I think we should have defended the goal better because it was the first ball into the penalty area from a wide position and we should have been able to do better.”