The blame does not all lie with Michael Duff

The downside to anyone being a football manager is that you end up shouldering the blame for performances on the pitch but the stark reality is that the position at Swansea City now must see a few more taking responsibility for our predicament.

When you glance at the league table this morning it will show the club in 22nd place with just a two point return from the opening six games of the new management team.   That was, without a doubt, not the return that the new regime as a whole imagined when they were making a host of decisions during the course of the summer.

But it is the reality that they have to face up to this morning, a reality not helped by the pathetic way that we surrendered to Cardiff in front of the Sky TV cameras on Saturday night.   A performance a mile away from anything we have experienced in that fixture over the past two seasons which tells you much about the way that we have regressed in the past few months and a regression for which several people much take their share of the blame.

Andy Coleman and Paul Watson were also summer appointments and, by their own admission, have played their part in pulling together a squad that included thirteen new additions and of course the appointment of Michael Duff to replace Russell Martin as manager.    In fact the story goes that it was Watson that personally voted to appoint Duff as manager when he was one of a host of linked managers for the vacancy created by the departure of Martin.

That departure of the former manager took on a whole new level of negotiation that is rarely seem on a managerial change and Watson was the man at the heart of those negotiations as Southampton and the Swans quibbled over what seemed to be just a few hundred thousand pounds disturbing the summer plans of both clubs in the process.

The thirteen additions to the squad over the course of the summer months may well have been numbers we did not expect but based on the early evidence of them arriving very few have filled the voids left by summer departures (or loan players returning to their club) with only Josh Key (a January target for the club) and Charlie Patino (on loan from Arsenal) really showing well in a team that has not started well.

It is fair to remember that it is early days for most of those arrivals but that early evidence sees many fingers pointed at the man tasked with the summer recruitment and that is Paul Watson.  Watson signed on at Swansea from Luton, a side that was destined for the Premier League.   His role at the Swans seems more clear than his role at Luton and it is really difficult to find a Luton fan who actually  knows what Watson did to the club.   Swans fans assumed (rightly or wrongly) when he signed on that we were bringing in someone who understood how to recruit for a team and a promotion drive but it seems his role here has far more influence than any role he has held before.   The jury remains out on whether that influence is misplaced in being given.

Coleman was appointed as Chairman after an investment into the club.   He has interacted with the fans and has looked to move his family to Swansea although a recent personal loss has seen him absent from the club and, of course, we send condolences for that club.   His opening gambit at the club was to swipe at the media who speculated on the future of Julian Winter at the club.   Winter of course departed and Coleman was in charge.    Whatever the desire was of Watson to appoint Duff it would have been Coleman – in conjunction with the majority owners – who sanctioned the move.

Right now it feels that the appointment of the new manager was a bad one.   Pre-season did not instil any confidence that there were good times around the corner and the biggest disappointment for me over the past few games has been that we do not appear to have any visible plan on what we are trying to achieve.   We gave up the points to both Bristol City and Cardiff City too easily and there is not a single point from any of the games that we have played where you can say that we were unlucky and should have got a better return than we did.   The play is slow, cumbersome and seemingly without purpose and has led many to suggest already that we are looking like a relegation candidate.   And it is hard to argue with that assessment on the first six games alone.

Michael Duff must take a decent chunk of the blame for that but Watson and Coleman are not immune from their own share of the blame and the bit that worries me is that if we did decide to admit a mistake and part company with Duff that these two would spearhead the search for his replacement.   And do any of us have confidence that the next search would end any better than the last one/?   I’m not sure that I do.

The club hierarchy have talked much about an ambition to return to the Premier League but the only way the club is heading out of this division at the moment is at the wrong end of it.  For a club to have real ambitions of Premier League status you have to show Premier League ambition and whilst our recruitment over the summer was plentiful it is difficult to say that too many of the signings have matched a statement such as Premier League ambition which tells you all you need to know.

Right now this is very much about the results on the pitch and for that Michael Duff will carry the majority of the blame but we should not lose sight of the fact that our decisions off the field are on a par with our decisions on it.   And that worries me quite a bit.