Williams: “I feel like I am saying the same thing every week”

Luke Williams admitted he felt like he was saying the same thing every week after the Swans succumbed to another set piece goal and put in another sub standard performance in a defeat to QPR that keeps the relegation fear alive although a seven point cushion with six games to go should prove to be enough.

It was another afternoon where the Swans dominated possession but with so much of it playing around the backline there were very few real threats on the visitors goal with goalkeeper Asmir Begovic commanding in his area despite a barrage of crosses, most of which were placed into an area that made it easy for him.

Unfortunately for Williams this kind of performance seems to be the norm from a squad that plays football often at a walking pace and certainly not with the pace and intensity that the Swans boss talks about wanting to play with.   That in itself tells you about the summer challenges ahead where the need to strengthen the squad in many areas is evident and needs to be several levels higher than the recruitment that we saw last summer.

But back to the QPR game, the frustration of Williams was clear to see both during the game and to listen to it afterwards as he said “It’s very annoying. I think we started the game in the wrong way, it took us a while to wake up.

“Their main threat came from counter-attacks, we concede the corner from a counter-attack and then we concede from the corner.

“I feel like I am saying the same thing every week, we have struck the woodwork twice, we had plenty of actions into the box, but we could not land the right connection to hit the back of the net.

“It would be one thing to say we are not creating anything, but we are creating. We just need to score. We know what we have to do to improve.

“We created, I think, three big chances that we need to take and then the game can go in a different direction.

“I know we have a good group who will not give up and will continue to be brave. We will watch it back, understand what we need to do better and what we need to do to get there.

“But it’s frustrating for 19,000 people here, and we have to do a bit better, to show them more for them to come back.”

The problems here is that we do not seem to be learning from these mistakes.   We cannot simply go through periods where we say the same things week in week out and the performances on the pitch do not come anywhere near the standards that the staff tell us they want to achieve.  Quite simply until we do learn from those mistakes we will always look over our shoulder at any gap to the bottom – is that really the level of our ambition?

That performance and win against Cardiff is a distant memory and achieved only to paper over the cracks it seems.