All good things come to an end and some problems come crashing down to earth; this was nothing short of a disaster in the South Wales derby in a performance nothing short of hideous.<\/p>\n
Optimism is always reasonably high ahead of these games despite league form with the respective positions in the division often having little bearing on the eventual outcome.<\/p>\n
But this absolutely went as all the pessimistic Swans fans feared, indeed worse in many aspects at least in terms of expecting some sort of attacking football. This was undoubtedly one of our worst performance in many a year.<\/p>\n
Bob Bradley would have been disappointed with that type of disjointed performance and it was unrecognisable from the team that swatted Cardiff City away without so much as a sweat in recent years.<\/p>\n
It’s a depressingly reminder of how far this club is falling and will continue to fall should there not be some serious changes.<\/p>\n
Three new players made their debut with Kristian Pedersen, Josh Tymon and Jamal Loee (for the second time) coming in in what was an unchanged formation.<\/p>\n
Rushworth<\/em><\/p>\n Darling – Wood – Pederson<\/em><\/p>\n Key – Fulton – Grimes – Patimo – Tymon<\/em><\/p>\n Yates – Lowe<\/em><\/p>\n The first half was best described as cagey; at worst a dismal affair between two poor teams with the only concern being to not concede the opening goal. Sky Sports were probably in bemusement at their decision to air this bottom of the table Championshop affair.<\/p>\n Because despite all the fanfare around Cardiff City and Erol Bulut being the next Pep this world beating, globetrotting behemoth have won a mighty single game this season against bottom of the league Sheffield Wednesday.<\/p>\n The viewing proved this and the fact the first save of note came in first half injury time tells you the story that this wasn’t a thriller for the neutral. The save from Rusbworth was solid, denying the somehow Pele-esque Yakou Meite from close range.<\/p>\n So surely the second half could only be better? Well yes but it depends from which perspective you hold.<\/p>\n No changes from either manager at half time although a huge change in intensity from Cardiff City as the Swans struggled to contain the energetic home team.<\/p>\n Karlan Grant – a one time Swans loan target to be the highest paid player at the club- was causing Josh Key problems down the Cardiff left as Duff’s weak team struggled against the strength in midfield.<\/p>\n Home midfielder Siopis had Grimes and Fulton on the ropes repeatedly as the Bluebirds took full control of the fixture with the breakthrough eventually arriving just after the halfway point of the second half.<\/p>\n Duff had tried to increase the intensity by replacing two strikers – Lowe and Yates – with Paterson and Ginnelly. Because of course when you don’t like look scoring removing two strikers who can score makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n The substitution roulette was won by Bulut as one of his changes Ollie Tanner received a long ball, side stepped debutant Tymon and whipped a curling strike past a stranded Rushworth.<\/p>\n That noise was haunting and had it not been for weak finishing by Grant and a couple of good saves by Rusbworth (again from Meite\/Pele) then the home team would have been out of sight.<\/p>\n It wasn’t long before the seal was put on a comfortable victory as Pedersen hauled down Tanner just inside the box to concede a penalty which of course Aaron Ramsey passed into the corner. Game over.<\/p>\n There was some late urgency as in added time Kukharevych and Cullen were introduced but it was a sad indictment of the current predicament in SA1 as the Swans went out with a whimper.<\/p>\n The away fan reaction was angry and largely aimed at Duff rather than the players for yet another dreadful show in what is turning into a bit of a nightmare. It’s only September!<\/p>\n Nobody could have predicted this bad a start and when you consider we are yet to play the likes of Leicester, Leeds or Southampton then worse may yet be to come.<\/p>\n The lack of cohesion, passion, fight and drive was an embarrassment to this proud football club. We know we won’t win every game and nor does anyone expect otherwise. But what we do expect is effoer and that isn’t what we saw yesterday.<\/p>\n Duff cut a forlorn figure on the sidelines during and after the match; a man lost in his thoughts, puzzled where to turn and how to arrest a slide that he pleads can be turned around.<\/p>\n What we’ve seen so far shows no sign of delivering the fast paced attacking football we were promised by Duff after his arrival from Barnsley in the summer and the vocal reaction on social media and in the away end yesterday speaks volume.<\/p>\n Two absolutely massive games this week coming where nothing less than two wins would suffice after six games and just two points. Are you confident?<\/p>\n I’m not.<\/p>\n MATCH FACTS AND LINE UPS<\/strong><\/p>\n OTHER CHAMPIONSHIP RESULTS<\/strong><\/p>\n LATEST TABLE<\/strong><\/p>\n NEXT UP FOR THE SWANS<\/strong><\/p>\n All good things come to an end and some problems come crashing down to earth; this was nothing short of a disaster in the South Wales derby in a performance nothing short of hideous. Optimism is always reasonably high ahead of these games despite league form with the respective positions in the division often having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":87263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,108,49,203],"tags":[1587,1507],"class_list":["post-87264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-team","category-match-reports","category-news","category-opinion","tag-cardiff-city-2-swansea-city-0-efl-championship-16th-september-2023","tag-the-2023-24-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87264","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=87264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}