It seems a long time ago that the Swans were struggling after a poor start to the season but it’s clear to see that the team is coming of age and the patience is paying off.<\/p>\n
Indeed Russell Martin was under pressure after a run of two wins in 15, something highlighted on BBC Radio Wales after the match but things change quickly in football and it undoubtedly has.<\/p>\n
Martin’s young squad are showing a maturity far beyond their collective years – the Swans had the youngest line up in the Championship for the last two rounds of fixtures – and 4th position is testament to that.<\/p>\n
Today’s fixture against Cardiff had all the potential for a Swans slip up against a team struggling for form and confidence but from the seventh minute when Callum Robinson saw red there was never a doubt in where the points would be heading.<\/p>\n
And through Martin’s sensible management along with the team’s growth of late it all leads to a very rosy picture in SA1 with significant experience like Ryan Manning, Joe Allen, Joel Piroe and Jamie Paterson due to return to the squad in the coming week or so.<\/p>\n
Martin told the official site post match: “It was a really enjoyable day.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were helped with the early red card. It was something we spoke to our players about – especially the young ones in the team – to not get involved in any of that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThankfully for us, one of their players did.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a really easy mistake to make when the atmosphere is like this in such a big game.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, it was about sticking to our game plans more than ever and not changing anything because we are playing 10 men. We wanted to play with pace.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really liked us, we created a lot and we should have scored more goals than we did.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took a bit of time to score the first one, and then we got a bit excited to go and score the second goal, which did not help us really.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know there is an expectation that you should go and score more goals against 10 men, but Cardiff were fighting hard to stay in the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a great bit of learning for us.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got three bookings for getting involved in stuff that we had spoken about, things that their player had got sent off for – albeit not as extreme. But we shouldn’t have got involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe needed to keep being us, but got the game back under control and I really liked the last half hour. The frustration is we did not score more goals.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I am really proud of them, it\u2019s such a young team again. They are growing all the time, the connection between the supporters and the team is growing all the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully everyone goes away happy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems a long time ago that the Swans were struggling after a poor start to the season but it’s clear to see that the team is coming of age and the patience is paying off. Indeed Russell Martin was under pressure after a run of two wins in 15, something highlighted on BBC Radio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":68333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203,306],"tags":[546,636,665],"class_list":["post-71191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","category-reactions","tag-cardiff-city","tag-russell-martin","tag-the-2022-23-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71191","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\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}