Villa must strengthen this summer

London: For some Aston Villa supporters, the club's miserable league position is entirely predictable.

Villa sold a couple of their best players, Ashley Young and Stewart Downing, in the summer and appointed Alex McLeish, a manager with two relegations in three Premier League seasons on his CV, to take charge of a team who had made hard work of surviving in the previous campaign.

Villa, so the theory goes, were an accident waiting to happen. Shay Given, however, refuses to subscribe to that view. "I don't think it was always going to be a difficult season. I think we have underachieved as a club and as a team," the Villa goalkeeper said ahead of tonight's home game against Bolton.

Lacking experience

Given added: "The most important thing is we get up to safety and then we can hopefully strengthen in the summer and bring in a few more experienced players. I think we are lacking that. We don't have enough players with experience. We have a lot of young players in the team and squad. But we can't look past Tuesday. We know we are not safe and it is important we focus on the next couple of games."

Confidence is brittle. Villa have won just one of their last 12 league matches and it is a measure of how poor they have been in front of their own supporters that they have won only once at home in the past five months. To compound matters, James Collins has joined Richard Dunne on the sidelines after picking up a groin injury against Sunderland last week.

— The Guardian News & Media Ltd