Pardew states the obvious!

The 1-0 defeat at Villa Park yesterday showed the glaring holes that we have in our squad.

Most of us knew that the squad was light on players before the season even kicked off.

Actually that's probably wrong as our squad is as big as many other squads in the Premier League. What we do miss though is a little bit of quality in reserve so when injuries or suspension hit we are left wanting in certain positions.

Which is why, to this day, it still confuses me when I look back at the January transfer window. Here we had an opportunity to tamper with the squad and add a bit of quality to it, but we failed miserably in that respect and ended the month weaker, both in numbers and quality, than we were when we started the month.

This is not to negate the fact that we received a silly money bid for Andy Carroll which, in reality, was hard to turn down, or the fact that we are currently overseeing a pretty bad injury crisis, made worse by suspension to some key players, but moaning about it is a little hard to take when the vast majority of our fans could see the problem a mile off.

The result of this was a weak bench which highlighted just how low we are on quality within the squad. This is not to downplay some of the youngsters who made the bench, but in reality there should be perhaps one or two of those kids on it, along with some of those that were included in the starting line up yesterday. It gave us a lack of options, and that is Alan Pardew's main gripe:

“There were not a lot of options on the bench for us, and that is a worry," Pardew told The Chronicle. "When games are not really flowing and there is nothing happening, you want to try to change it. We had four young boys on the bench."

“We didn’t have the options we should have for a club our size. That is a little note for next year. We don’t want to get in that situation again. Villa bought on the likes of Reo-Coker, Heskey and Pires and it makes a big difference.”

It was always going to be tough for us and there was always going to be times when our backup players would have to be called upon. We were never going to assemble a Premier League squad - with squad being the operative word - overnight.

Our starting XI is not too bad and doesn't require major surgery in my view. We need a new striker or two and a right-winger (or left if we move Jonas), maybe a new left-back (if Jose goes) as a priority. We'll have Hatem Ben Arfa back next season, hopefully, and Dan Gosling so we are effectively boosted by two new signings already.

Aside from that we just need to beef up the squad with a bit more quality in my opinion, so that when injuries hit we aren't down to the bare bones.

That's the big test for the summer for me. I don't care how much money we spend and I'm not fixated on that £35 million, as long as the squad is in better shape for next season.

Fortunately it looks as though next season will be in the Premier League!