Michael Duff cut a forlorn figure in his technical area last night and nothing in his post match press conference served as any sort of comfort.<\/p>\n
The Swans boss – already under pressure after just two points in five games – saw his team deliver an utterly abject performance demonstrating a serious lack of identity and (most import!ntly) pride.<\/p>\n
Some accountability needs to be owned by the manager but after this defeat not much was on offer as Duff bemoaned the sideways passing without offering a reason as to why his team were so poor.<\/p>\n
Since our promotion to the Championship in the 2008 we have never failed to turn up in these derby games but unfortunately the performance was reminiscent of everything we’ve mocked Cardiff City for.<\/p>\n
A team of fairly expensive individuals without any fight or plan clearly lacking the importance of what this day means to the normal Swansea City fan – all the things they used to be.<\/p>\n
Indeed Cardiff City were fired up and were every hit worth the three points in a game where they probably should have had more. In contrast the first effort on target from the Swans came with a tame header from Liam Cullen.<\/p>\n
Being honest and even taking away the five games before it is clear as day that things are not right and this performance is befitting a club and team in an identity crisis and disarray. The worry is how will it unfold?<\/p>\n
Duff said: “I don’t like getting beat. I’m not stupid. I’m not na\u00efve. I’m sure there’ll be a vent at me today. But I’ve been here before. This is where you see the true characters at the club. The ones that stick together. The ones that don’t blame everyone else. The ones that don’t whisper in the corridors.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been here before. There’s been a lot of change at the football club and that’s not me hiding behind it.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had three debuts today. Kristian (Pedersen) looked tired at the end and you could see that from the penalty. We had Olivier (Ntcham) refusing to play the night before the first game. The Joel Piroe situation, the Woody (Nathan Wood) situation, Joe Allen’s in the team today and then gets injured in the warm up.<\/p>\n
“So it feels like it’s backs against the wall. But this is when you see the true characters<\/p>\n
“Lots of staff have left. Lots of players have come in. New coaching staff. So, I’ll just stick to what I believe in and my values. I won’t come off script on that. We’re trying to change the way they play because last year was extreme in terms of the way they wanted to play. I don’t think this is the first time we’d been on a difficult run because I think we went through this last year when I wasn’t in the building.”<\/p>\n
Early calls for the manager’s dismissal is likely to be nothing more than noise aa the faith demonstrated to Russell Martin proved that the owners are not keen to make knee jerk decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michael Duff cut a forlorn figure in his technical area last night and nothing in his post match press conference served as any sort of comfort. The Swans boss – already under pressure after just two points in five games – saw his team deliver an utterly abject performance demonstrating a serious lack of identity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":87259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203,306],"tags":[546,1507],"class_list":["post-87257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","category-reactions","tag-cardiff-city","tag-the-2023-24-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87257","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=87257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}