Dean Smith spoke to the media following Aston Villa’s 2-1 reverse against Chelsea on Sunday.

The Villa Head Coach saw his side hold a 1-0 lead at half-time thanks to Kortney Hause’s strike, but two goals in three second-half minutes from Christian Pulisic and Olivier Giroud inflicted defeat.

Speaking post-match at Villa Park, here’s what Smith had to say…

On the result and performance…

“It's a disappointing result because of the position we’re in and the games we’ve got left, we want to win football games. We took the lead against a very good team, I thought we made them work extremely hard as well, our defensive organisation again was good. We know if we go and open ourselves up and press them they’ve got the quality of players who can play through you. You only had to look at their nine subs on the bench to know what a quality squad they’ve got there. If you’ve been established in the Champions League, let alone the Premier League, for the last 15 years then that’s what you’ll have. But the players gave their all and I think the end tally was we had five shots on target and they had four. It just shows what a good defensive performance it was without the ball and we’ve had chances with the ball, unfortunately we didn’t take them.”

On the first two matches since resuming action…

“Chelsea have had an awful lot of the ball, we knew that would happen, but I’m sure they would say they’ve had to work hard for that victory. We made them work hard. There’s a lot of positives to take from both performances, we should have beaten Sheffield United, we should have taken our chances in that game, that felt like two points lost. This one, you have to take it on the chin because they are a quality team.”

On Newcastle and bouncing back…

“Newcastle have just had a 3-0 win as well, it’s down to us now to go there and put in a performance. If you go and get a win at Newcastle then all of a sudden it looks a brighter place again.”

You can watch Dean’s full interview now on VillaTV, without the need to log in, click here.

Dean’s Debrief: Disappointing result, positives to take and bouncing back