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Chief Sam Allardyce criticized Jake Livermore and hinted that he might lose the West Brom captaincy after his red card in Albion’s nightmare derby loss.
Anwar El Ghazi’s double, including a late penalty, and Bertrand Traore’s spike earned Aston Villa a dominant 3-0 victory at The Hawthorns.
Livermore was shown a red card in the first half, after a VAR review, for a lunge on Jack Grealish to compound Allardyce’s woes in his first game in charge.
It was the Baggies’ third red card of the season and he will miss the next three games, with Allardyce refusing to rule out a captaincy change.
“It depends on who wants to be captain after this and who can handle the bracelet. If I think they’re good enough they can keep it,” said the former England manager, with Albion second in the Premier League.
“I will not accept another expulsion, whatever happens. We have to stop that, otherwise we will not have a chance to get out of this problem.
“It’s the first thing I asked the players, whatever you do, they don’t send you off. I’m upset, it couldn’t be anything other than upset.
“He has apologized to the players and to us. He seems very upset about that, but from my point of view, an experienced player like him shouldn’t have put himself in that position.”
“We have to deal with that and it means we not only suffer today, but also because we can’t pick him for three games. We need all the players we have who have Premier League experience. We don’t have many of those.
“All 10 men fought bravely to try and stay in the game. They tried and tried against a Villa team that is playing very well this season.
“I am really disappointed with the result, but I give credit to the 10 men for doing their job.”
El Ghazi opened the scoring in the fifth minute when he converted a cross from Traore from close range.
Albion never recovered and his hopes were more than eight minutes before halftime when Livermore was fired for a dangerous challenge on Grealish.
Referee Martin Atkinson initially gave the midfielder a yellow card, but updated it to red after looking at his field monitor.
Soon after, Kortney Hause was booked for catching Grady Diangana on his ankle, and Albion wondered why the defender wasn’t sent off as well.
Ollie Watkins had an offside goal disallowed, but Villa made the game safe with six minutes to go when Traore coldly found the bottom corner from the edge of the area.
It was 3-0 with two minutes remaining when El Ghazi scored from the penalty spot after Semi Ajayi’s awkward foul on Grealish.
Villa is now just three points out of the top five with two games in hand after back-to-back derby wins following last week’s win at Wolves.
“With the pandemic, I’m not thinking of Europe at all, as we can’t travel right now,” smiled Chief Dean Smith.
“But seriously, we’re not thinking about that. We’re just thinking about the next game.”
“There is a great focus at the moment and there is a will to continue progressing as a club and as individual players.
“As long as I have that, whatever it is, it will be. We’ll keep working hard.
“It was an excellent performance. We wanted to cancel the rebound of the new managers that the teams can have and I thought we did very well.
“We got a great goal to start and we restricted them, I can’t remember their chances, such was our control of the game.”
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