Phil Sumbler
The life of a football manager is not an easy one. Your stock is generally only as good as maybe your last half a dozen results and you live quite often on the edge of the demands of the fans to make changes at the earliest sign of a poor run of form.
Just three short weeks ago it looked for all the money as if Michael Duff was living life on the wrong side of a managerial tightrope. There seemed to be a high likelihood that one more bad result could signal the end of his time in SA1 just a few short months after it started. Fast forward five games and Duff’s side have picked up thirteen points from fifteen and sit back in the top half of the table with all of a sudden people starting to look upwards with a degree of optimism as opposed to downwards with a real fear of relegation. Three weeks between possible success and failure is really the way to sum up that life of a football manager.
So you have to give some serious credit to the manager for the part that he has played in turning around the Swans fortunes. Saturday’s 3-1 win at Plymouth secured a fourth successive maximum return but it was also the style in which we scored three second half unanswered goals that lifted the optimism even more. To see the clinical nature of the breakaway that saw the third goal scored right at the end of the game was a throwback to days gone by and certainly put to bed any myth that a Michael Duff side is incapable of playing some half decent football. In truth that goal was more than half decent as was the opening two goals of the game that took the Swans tally to an impressive eleven goals in that four match winning streak.
Duff will have led his side to this winning streak under some considerable pressure which was caused not just by the six game streak at the start of the season that saw us pick up just two points but also by the pathetic nature that we surrendered at Cardiff in the first South Wales derby of the season. That performance was more akin to the nature of the way Cardiff have approached derbys in recent years and, after the euphoria of four straight wins in the fixture, it was a big bump to earth for not just the fans but pretty much the whole squad at the same time.
And it certainly proved – or at least it has so far – to be a pivotal point in Michael Duff’s time in charge at Swansea. You can choose to believe the “player revolution” that allegedly demanded Duff changed things or not but one thing is for certain a manager cannot change things if the players don’t want to and that works in reverse. Indeed, if you choose to blame the manager for all that was wrong in the first six games of the season then you have to provide him with a large dollop of the credit for all that has been right in the five games since.
Frankly I do not care if things changed around because the players led a march to his door to demand that he changed it or not (and personally from my perspective I have seen no evidence to suggest that this played out in the way that it has been described) the simple fact is that the manager has worked with his squad to make changes in the way we approach games and right now that is paying us huge dividends. And those dividends cannot be enjoyed without giving credit to the manager.
He has been criticised in some quarters for his living arrangements, his playing style, his press interviews and somewhere is probably also responsible for the cost of living crisis but right now he has to take a very large degree of credit for the fact that his side is one of the form horses in the division.
What is evident right now is that there is a unison in the squad between the manager and his players. These people are working together as one. There is no splits in the camp, there are no disgruntled players who disagree with the training routines and there are no tantrums which have been evident under previous management regimes. This is a group of players who all believe what they are doing right now, enjoy what they are doing and, most importantly, are good at what they are doing. As someone pointed out at the weekend all of a sudden we resemble a football team again. Long may that continue.
The words have been uttered by several players over recent games and backed up by the manager and Chairman. It is clear that the things they have read on social media have hit a nerve and they have been keen to dispel some of the myths that have developed over time. Much talk about the attitude of the players, the togetherness in the squad and the work ethic that has been developed as been as obvious in the past three weeks as anything that we have seen on the pitch. This is something that everyone seems at pains to keep in the public domain and that is exceptionally telling.
For all the criticism that Duff took in the opening weeks of the season he now has to take credit in equal measure. There is no other way of doing it. Football is a team game but the man at the helm is the one that carries the can and therefore he should be able to receive the credit as well. Anything else is creating a narrative. And an unfair one.
The Swans now have two more weeks until the next fixture – home to Leicester City – and Duff will want to take this exceptional run of form into that spell after the international break. And what a test to come back with – the Fixes have won ten of their eleven games this season and top the division.
But on current form we should not be afraid!
When a team is winning a manager can live where he wants and pick the team that he wants .When we list to Wedt Ham and the manager Laudrup left immediately after the game to fly to Paris for his daughter’s birthday he was widely criticised .Yet he had been doing exactly that sort of thing for 18 months .However, because we were so successful nobody gave a damn.
People were far too quick to jump on Duff’s back particularly after the Cardiff game when just before that game we had signed another 4 new players to add to the 9 we had signed in the summer .Added to the slow, one dimentional system he inherited from Martin what did people expect .
By the same token things are looking great at the moment but let’s keep our feet on the ground . Two or three defeats could change everything .That is the nature of football .
All ee can say is that the squad are very well organised under particularly at both ends of the pitchsnd there seems to be a real bond amongst the players .The squad also looks bigger and stronger than for some time