On Wednesday night, Aston Villa were easily beaten by Manchester City in the FA Cup, with supporters feeling aggrieved that they had gone to support their team at Eastlands and witnessed a reserve team lining up.

Gerard Houllier was at first unrepentant about his decision to rest several key players ahead of Saturday’s match at Bolton, although the Frenchman has now said sorry for not letting the fans know what his selection was going to be.

“I’m sorry,” said Houllier. “Perhaps I should have warned the fans before but it is not as if I was playing the youth team. I took a risk but these are good players.”

This is the latest difficult moment for Houllier, who has incurred the wrath of Villa supporters already for claiming that if his team were going to lose a match, they might as well do this against his former club Liverpool.

“The league is such that we are more comfortable than at Christmas but we need more points to stay up,” he said. “We might need 42 points to stay up, so the job is not done yet. We have an important game. Bolton have 37 points and we have 33. It’s a final for us – [there are] 10 finals to play.”