Aston Villa got knocked out of the FA Cup at the weekend with a pretty toothless performance being put in by the club against Swansea City.

The Swans are below the Villans in the Sky Bet Championship table but the performance of the two sides far from portrayed that.

Indeed, Villa were pretty slow and ponderous with early goals in both halves effectively killing the tie before a final Swansea goal in the last 15 minutes.

Dean Smith, then, has got some work to do right now at Villa Park to get them playing once more and it remains to be seen how quickly he can manage to do that.

In the meantime, though, we learned a few things from the game so here are the lessons we took away from the Villans' defeat...

They miss Jack Grealish. Badly.

It's not exactly a ground-breaking claim, of course, given Grealish's immense quality but it seems as though they are suffering without him right now.

The sooner he is back, the better.

Long ball does not work for Villa, that is clear.

They went direct at times with Scott Hogan up top and it yielded very little indeed.

Hogan is not a target man and yet Villa pumped it forwards. Pointless.

Scott Hogan needs time.

He looked out of sorts a lot during the game and is clearly well short of confidence and match-fitness.

He needs time to get to the right level and it remains to be seen if he is going to get it.