Allardyce believes his sides failure to hit the back of the net cost them two valuable points.
“Our chances came and went because we didn’t hit the target enough,” said Sam.
“When you have the chances and don’t hit the target, people tend to forget them or dismiss them as not being chances. Several chances went begging for us to have done better, but they were either blocked, saved or we failed to hit the target.
“We put 38 balls into the opposition box and Villa had eight in our box in total, so that shows the dominating factors in our game. Basically, Villa in the final third got eight balls into our box and we had 38 and everybody’s responsibility to score goals has deserted them at the minute.
“Our great ammunition last year in scoring and winning was everybody scoring and I don’t think we had a player in our first 14 or 15 players who didn’t score, other than Guy Demel. Joey O’Brien, James Tomkins, Winston Reid, James Collins, Mark Noble, Kevin Nolan, Matt Taylor, Carlton Cole, Andy Carroll, Ricardo Vaz Te and Matt Jarvis all chipped in with a goal when we needed them which meant we finished tenth.
“Kevin Nolan was our leading goalscorer with ten and that wouldn’t normally get you tenth place, unless one other player scored at least ten or more, and we didn’t. We only had Andy with seven, which showed how many goals we shared around the team. That goal-sharing has deserted us at the minute and that is the real reason why we’re not on about 14 or 15 points.
“We’ve had six games when we haven’t conceded a goal, which meant we only needed to score one goal to win the three points. We scored three at Tottenham and haven’t scored a goal in any of the others [apart from Cardiff City] to get that lovely cushion of a three-point which we’ve richly deserved on several occasion but failed miserably. It’s only been our fault, nobody else’s.”