Lessons to learn and tough decisions to be made after Southampton game

Luke Williams can concentrate on many positives from a second half performance yesterday but he must also learn some lessons from the first half display and should know this morning that there are some tough decisions to be made in the coming weeks.

“Timid and disjointed” were just two words that the Swans boss used post match to describe the first forty-five minutes of a game that saw us second best for pretty much every minute of that period and lucky to only go into the break with a two goal deficit to worry about, it simply could have been much much worse.

The Swans boss has a little bit of a free hit ahead of him over the remaining months of the season.   The Swans have too much about them to be dragged into any level of a relegation fight but at the same time we do not have anywhere near enough ability to make a late run for the play offs.   It means that the boss has four months to make his assessments of his squad and plan for what he needs next season.

As he talks about high tempo performances he will be left in no doubt from yesterday’s game that the Swans are lacking alot of quality and depth to be able to play that kind of high tempo game or certainly on a frequent basis.   The good news for us is that when we did achieve that in the second half for the last twenty minutes or so we looked a dangerous team.

The first half though painted a very different story and it is that first half that starts to ask questions on decisions that are ahead of Luke Williams at the moment.    And some of those decisions are likely to be unpopular ones.

At the forefront has to be his midfield choices.   A midfield that contains Matt Grimes and Jay Fulton at the heart of it simply does not work.  Neither player seems keen to play a high pressing game and neither chase the ball when it is not in their possession.   For large periods of the first half yesterday both players were backing away from the ball and the natural instinct of both players is largely to slow play down.   From what we have seen that does not fit a style of play that Williams wants and could make them both vulnerable as far as the longer term goes.

For Grimes then that is more of a challenge as he is the club captain.   A virtual ever present since we dropped back into the Championship in 2018 I would bring into question his leadership skills.   Yesterday’s first half performance called for a leader on the pitch but we don’t seem to have a natural one amongst our midst.   This will be something that Williams will consider when he is making his long term decisions but the presence of Matt Grimes may not be as guaranteed as it has been in recent seasons?   And does he have a long term future as club captain?

Another challenge ahead of him is his loan players.   Yesterday we saw Rushworth, Ashby, Humphreys and Lowe all in the side and yet none of them are a permanent player for the Swans.   You can add Patino to that who was a second half substitute.  That tells you much about our reliance on loan players to bolster our first team but it leads to the same challenge every summer in that they have to be replaced.   And that is before you consider the fact that they could all be recalled in January.  The loan market is there to be used cleverly by some clubs but the way we have operated in recent years we have made it the heart of our transfer strategy which is a short termism as you can get.   Luke Williams is no mug and will be aware of that but he will also need to be backed in the permanent market for it to change.

And those thoughts are before you consider whether the loan players have actually strengthened the squad.   Rushworth is undoubtedly a better keeper than Fisher and Patino is probably the most creative of our midfielders but outside of that has the loan market really worked for us.    Harrison Ashby looked out of his depth for large periods of yesterday’s game and Southampton saw this and exploited it.   The sooner Josh Key is fit the better?

The other thing that Williams will not have been blind to will have been the severe lack of movement that exists within the squad.   All too often you had Rushworth looking to make a quick play from the back but he was faced with most of his team mates having their back to him.   Contrast that with Southampton who looked for space and ran into it.   This isn’t a difficult thing to understand but it leaves the keeper with little option to pass the ball short to a central defender who by this time are being closed down by the attackers.   We simply have to create a team that wants the ball and looks for it but that comes back to the same problem discussed with the central midfielders above.

To create what he wants it does mean that Williams needs to make some tough decision and that could easily mean leaving out some players who have been relatively guaranteed a spot in recent weeks, months and even years.

The good news is that there are some positives to take from the second half.   Paterson was a different player as the Swans puushed forward, moving from the petulance of the first half to the player that we know he can be.   Bolaise added something when he came on as substitute whilst we have to gain some confidence over Joe Allen’s fitness so he can add more to the midfield.

We also need to realise that playing with width makes such a difference to the way we play.   From the narrowness of the first half the chances that we created all came from moments where the ball was played wide.  This is where the most recent transfer links can fill us with some level of confidence that Williams wants to add width to the squad – width that previous managers seem to forget existed.

As written earlier in the article this is a free hit period for Williams.   He has been afforded a rare (kind of) luxury where he can look and learn from his squad over a relatively long period.  And that will mean that we are likely to see experiments and changes that can be predictable and others of them being some level of surprise.

Interesting times ahead.