The Swans captain was pleased with the way the Swans handled themselves in the Welsh derby in midweek and wants that to continue as they face a tough test at Reading this afternoon.<\/p>\n
Monk told the Western Mail \u201cThere was a bit of added steel there which was just as pleasing as some of the football we played<\/p>\n
\u201cA little bit of that may be because it was a derby game but it was good to see \u2013 we even had little Leon Britton tearing about the place!<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, you need that in derby games where the passion is there, but we need it every week to some degree.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have got that side to us and it has to come out in the league. We\u2019re not just a football team who can only play the pretty stuff, but we have to accept we\u2019re not the most physical team either.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s me and Ashley Williams who are perhaps the most physical but slowly we are getting used to it as a team, everyone is learning.<\/p>\n
\u201cA few of the boys have been a bit surprised about how direct it can be at times in this division. We\u2019ve come up against sides that have got five or six 6ft-plus players used for that purpose whereas we can\u2019t rely on that \u2013 but we\u2019re improving even with the bodies we\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou saw on Tuesday Leon going up for a header with Steve McPhail, he might not win it but he did enough to put him off and the header goes over. If it\u2019s a free header it\u2019s on target.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith every game that\u2019s passed I think we\u2019ve improved in all departments \u2013 but especially at set-pieces<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not quite there and there\u2019s still a lot of work to be done, but we\u2019ve definitely improved in terms of organisation and dealing with things like long throws. We\u2019ve had some stick about set-pieces but it\u2019s been good it\u2019s been highlighted so much.<\/p>\n
\u201cSituations have come up in games where, in the back of your mind, your thinking I just can\u2019t let my man score because it will be all that will be talked about, even if we win.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlayers realise that and we\u2019ve all been trying our best to get it sorted. It\u2019s all part of a learning curve. Before we might have just put the ball out of play, now we\u2019re trying to get more distance on clearances, so the more direct teams can\u2019t just launch it back into the box.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully we\u2019ll keep on improving in that respect because football-wise we\u2019re up there in this division.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe win over Cardiff was great but it\u2019s good to be put away quite quickly, saying that, we can take the positives and the confidence gained from that performance and use them as a platform to go on from here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an important week for us because we want to get some points on the board before the international break.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been threatening a very good performances for a few weeks but it hasn\u2019t clicked as we would have liked.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I\u2019ve said all along that if we can get the first goal then we can gain that extra belief and have something to hold on to.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Swans captain was pleased with the way the Swans handled themselves in the Welsh derby in midweek and wants that to continue as they face a tough test at Reading this afternoon. Monk told the Western Mail \u201cThere was a bit of added steel there which was just as pleasing as some of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":453,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/453"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}