Stevie reveals his ambitious plans forVilla

VILLA head coach Steven Gerrard is confident the club can match his lofty ambitions after admitting his Anfield return had shown him the gap he has to close.

Gerrard accepted he had to rein in his gameplan to minimise the risk of Villa being one of the many teams who get hammered when they turn up at Anfield, but that only left him considering how he can turn his 13thplaced team into one which is challenging nearer the top of the table.

“Of course, I want the players and people at the club to be as ambitious as myself,” said Gerrard. “I am not saying my ambitions are different to theirs, we have a lot of ambitious players at the club, a lot of ambitious coaches, the people above us: the board and the owners are ambitious.

“But what we won’t do is… we won’t settle for anything except trying to improve, trying to grow.

“It is still really early days, but we have seen enough to believe we can take this club forward, finish the season in a positive position and then recruit and build and add to this.

“Take it forward. There is nothing wrong with being as ambitious as you can and I will never stop doing that.”

Gerrard accepts there are plenty of improvements to be made, particularly defensively, where Villa have kept just one clean sheet in the last 10 matches.

However, he was encouraged by how they kept the Premier League’s top scorers at bay for over an hour on Saturday.

“From a defensive point of view and how we defended our box and people really putting their bodies on the lines and maxing out for the team that was a real positive,” he added.

“I thought we contained Liverpool for a large part and that is a real difficult task. Hopefully as time goes by we can be more of a threat for more parts of the game.’’