Chris Brunt: Team selection not at fault for West Brom defeat

The Baggies squandered a 2-0 lead and lost 4-3 at Villa Park with Diego Lugano struggling in central defence after being surprisingly preferred to fit-again player of the year Gareth McAuley.

But Brunt said: "Diego got his goal last week against Everton and did quite well against Romelu Lukaku and the gaffer obviously didn't feel the need to make too many changes.

"Players like Christian Benteke will cause anybody problems, it doesn't really matter who you play there.

"But the lads will be disappointed with the way we defended, and that's not just pointing the finger at the back four.

"We defend from the front and when Villa went direct we didn't deal with it well.

"We didn't win the first ball and we didn't win enough second balls and that's probably where the game was won and lost.

"You can't score three goals in the Premier League and lose. That's not good enough.

"We didn't defend well enough, especially after the way we raced away at the start of the game.

"Benteke caused us a lot of problems for the whole game."

The Baggies were left angry after Lugano was penalised for a tug on Benteke to concede the penalty from which Villa won but was then denied a spot-kick of his own after clashing with Ciaran Clark.

Brunt said: "Diego put his hands on Benteke and they got one and at the other end Diego was pretty upset he didn't get one.

"You can usually tell by a player's reaction and how upset he is and he was pretty upset. And he wasn't the only one claiming it."

Brunt opened the scoring on three minutes with a brilliant long-range strike.

The Northern Ireland international said: "I was delighted. It sat up nicely and I just hit it and knew straight away it was going in.

"But it's bittersweet now. You go from being on top of the world to rock bottom in the space of 20 minutes, which is not great.

"We need to be a bit more streetwise about winning games and at the moment we're not doing that."