Taylor bemoans wayward finishing

Graham Taylor has admitted Aston Villa have under-achieved this season and he is blaming the club’s wayward finishing, which is officially the worst in the Premiership.

Statistics show Villa have had more shots at goal than any other side in the top flight this season – but they have also had the most off target.

A tally of 36 goals from 33 games is a meagre return for a side boasting an international strike force of Darius Vassell, Marcus Allback, Juan Pablo Angel and Dion Dublin plus England Under-21 player Peter Crouch.

But Vassell has seldom fired on all cylinders since returning from the World Cup, Allback’s chances have been severely limited and Angel had looked a shadow of his former self before recent knee surgery.

It has been left to the veteran Dublin, whose Villa career looked over when he was loaned to Millwall last season, to show some degree of consistency with 14 goals after starting the campaign as fifth-choice forward.

Taylor admitted: “I would not expect us to be where we are in the Premiership. It would be silly to say anything else.

“But the facts I’ve had presented to me are that we’ve had more shots this season than any other Premier League club and we’ve also had more shots off target than anyone else.

“For a side to be 14th and be the leading side in terms of shots just doesn’t add up – except when you look at how many we’ve missed.

“The simple fact is that we’ve not converted a high enough ratio of chances. You always expect that kind of run to stop and when we scored five times at Middlesbrough and then three at home to Blackburn we thought it had.

“Then we scored after three minutes at Fulham and we were looking upwards and at the top half of the table – but we then went AWOL in front of goal until at West Ham on Saturday.

“We are not very good at scoring goals. You can’t have those kind of statistics and say we’ve been unlucky.”