"To lose like that, once again, was hard to take. It's happened three times now recently," he said. "We were 4-3 up at Charlton and let them in at the death and we did the same five seconds from the end of the cup tie at Chelsea.
"We are not learning. We have to learn to kill a game off. That would have been a fantastic point for us. As the away side you should be happy to run down the clock, but we were still trying to go through the middle and score the winning goal."
David James, who put in a decent performance on his return to Villa Park since his switch to the true claret 'n' blue was also disappointed by conceding the late goal: "The manner in which we let the second goal in was, to say the least, unprofessional.
"There is nothing wrong with alehouse football in the last 30 seconds of the game; you just kick the ball down the other end instead of playing fancy and losing. We obviously did not do enough to get a point because we lost 2-1, but there have to be complaints, and both goals were avoidable.
"We have lost every away game this year in the league, but on Saturday we were 30 seconds away from gaining a point which would have been a good plus considering the way the situation is with the away results. Both goals were avoidable and we have come away with nothing yet again."
Assistant manager Paul Goddard told the club site that it was down to a combination of a lack of clinical finishing and defending in the dying minutes that lead to the defeat. "To lose in that manner is the hardest pill to swallow but what makes it even harder is that we feel we have been totally unprofessional in the last few minutes of the game.
"We had a number of chances to kill the game off, in three or four different situations, and we didn't. It is criminal what happened and that's what makes it more disappointing; we are still trying to do silly things in advanced areas when we just needed to kill the game off.
"You have to consider that, if you are at 1-1 away from home in the last few minutes of the game, you can take a point, and if we'd have come away with that it would have been hard earned and fantastic.
"But we have really slaughtered ourselves and it is very disappointing because there was nothing wrong with the performance, though we had to change the system a couple of times."