Ollie Watkins offers honest opinion on Ipswich draw
Ollie Watkins admitted a point was all Villa deserved after they had to settle for a 2-2 draw at Ipswich Town.
Unai Emery’s team fought their way back from a losing position for the third weekend running but this time were unable to hold their own lead, Liam Delap netting an equaliser with his second goal of the match 18 minutes from time.
Watkins, who had earlier put Villa in front after Morgan Rogers had cancelled out Delap’s opener, gave an honest assessment of a frustrating afternoon.
"It was a difficult game and I think a point is a fair result,” he said. “We didn't get it right in the final third, we could have been more ruthless, myself included.
"A point is a fair result but disappointing because there were a lot of opportunities for us. “They kept putting pressure on us, they're here at home, they made runs in behind and we grinded the result out in the end.
“They always put a lot of pressure on us and we couldn't really implement our game plan. Ipswich were always on to us and it was a bit of a basketball game which is what they wanted but we didn't.”
Villa would have gone level on points with Premier League leaders Liverpool with a win but were indebted to goalkeeper Emi Martinez who denied Delap one-on-one in the first half, shortly after Watkins’ goal.
Emery pointed to his team conceding 10 corners during the match as a sign they lacked control.
“We conceded 10 corners and how is the question?” he said. “We didn’t control the ball and our positioning to stop them getting to our box. They didn’t score through corners, but it showed we didn’t have control.”
The Villa boss continued: “Overall we have 13 points, but today we were as well optimistic about the possibility to get to Liverpool with 15 points.
“We can accept how difficult this league is and playing away, playing against a team like Ipswich who are excited and have a good structure tactically.
“They are playing with confidence and this is the difficulty we faced today in 90 minutes. In the first half we played even better than I had planned to stop their game plan and their capacity to push us.
“In the second half they played like I thought they would in the second half. Of course, in this moment we needed to be stronger than we were.”
