Frustrated Luke looks back on Cardiff City draw

Luke Williams was a frustrated man after the Swans let Cardiff back into the derby yesterday afternoon and the Bluebirds left SA1 with a deserved point in their pocket with many of the real talking points in the game coming towards the end of the fixture.

In truth it was a pretty flat derby occasion, sparked into life by Callum Robinson’s equaliser with ten minutes to go which sparked scenes of celebration in the away end that saw them encroach the playing area enough to collapse an advertising hoarding on Ollie Tanner enough to see the player with a gash on his leg as a direct result.

More than twenty minutes of “action” passed in the game after that equaliser, enough to see the only four yellow cards of the game and of course a red for Erol Bulut who simply ended up getting involved in something that he should have stayed well out of.   Indiscipline is something he should reflect back on today.

For Williams though he can look back on a game where the Swans dominated most of the opening half but he also has to look back this morning on the simple fact that he made the wrong changes at the wrong time and the Swans possession based football was out of the window.  He should also be alarmed at how easy the high press from Cardiff caused panic in his defence and take some lessons into upcoming games that, with the greatest of respect to yesterday’s opposition, will see a higher standard of competition for us to deal with.

And whilst Williams talked about missed chances, the ultimate tale of the statistics said that we had four attempts on target and two of those were part of the goal that we scored inside ten minutes.   With an early goal to settle the nerves we should have taken the opportunity to push on but we didn’t and that is something that Williams should be talking about when the debriefs start today.

“The frustration comes from not finishing some of our chances. I felt we had good situations where we could have done better and, had we done so, I think we could have come away with all the points,” said the Swans boss.

“When you are at 1-0, the longer the game goes on the more you start to worry if that second goal doesn’t drop and we got punished for that.

“It took us a little while to get a foothold, but once we did there was a real chunk of the game where we controlled things. We scored and we needed to score again in that spell.

“We tailed off a little at the end of the first half, we made a few sloppy mistakes and that opened the game up and we have to learn from that.

“We have seen that this group can be tough and battle, and we did that towards the end, but we are better when we have that control and we struggled to really dominate the game in the way we should do.”