Steve Bruce recently appeared on talkSPORT and said that the first thing he had to do when he took over at Aston Villa was to get his players believing in themselves once again.
The start to the season under Roberto Di Matteo was poor and followed on from a miserable Premier League campaign and as such, the Villa players were used to taking constant criticism and in some cases, nasty verbal abuse.
Bruce said that before he could work on tactics, techniques etc, he had to get the players feeling better about themselves.
He said:
When you get relegated there’s a doom and gloom and that surrounds everybody and Aston Villa are not used to it. It’s all about giving the players back that confidence, that belief, that they’re still good players. For too long they’ve been hit with a stick, if you like. So the first thing was to just try to lift confidence levels and blow a bit of belief back into them.
Villa had gotten into the habit of throwing away points late on in games which won’t have done the mentality of the players any good either, but the late winner in front of a packed away end at Reading will hopefully go someway to restoring the belief in confidence of the squad as they look to secure promotion back to the Premier League.
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