Miracles aside – proper ones, not the attainable ones Carlos Carvalhal had spoken about before the Bournemouth game – Swansea City are down. Kevin Elphick from fans’ site Vital Swansea https://swansea.vitalfootball.co.uk/ says the club have become greedy and complacent and need to re-connect with fans through promoting young talent.
Huddersfield have demonstrated in their last two games just what was required to stay in the Premier League. Fighting spirit, effort and desire and that ability to score goals now and then.
Things that we’ve struggled for in the last couple of months at least.
We lost 5-0 at Manchester City after looking like we settled for defeat before kick-off at the Etihad Stadium, yet Huddersfield went there on the weekend and got a 0-0 draw and a point.
They didn’t give in, they didn’t go there with a defeatist attitude, they actually went there with the self-belief that they were good enough to get a point at the champions, a side who have absolutely dominated all season, and going for 100 points in a single Premier League season.
Then, the Terriers went away to Chelsea, a side that beat us 1-0 on our own patch. Yet Huddersfield battled away once again, going a goal up before conceding an equaliser.
Yes, they sat back and defended, “parked the bus”, but they did what was needed to confirm their Premier League status for at least another season.
The efforts of both us and Huddersfield in their attempts to stay up couldn’t have been further away from each other. A lot of questions need asking and you can imagine Sunday’s final Premier League game with fellow relegated side Stoke City won’t be an enjoyable one for the likes of chairman Huw Jenkins.
This has been long coming, and if we did manage to stay up this season, it would be another long slog next year as well, where we’d probably have gone down.
For the last three seasons, we’ve sacked managers during the season and battled against the drop, but our squad has got worse and worse, so bad in fact that we couldn’t recover. Carlos Carvalhal did throw it away, after all, we were 4 points clear just 7 games ago, but he’s not the man to blame for this mess.
He didn’t sign the players, he didn’t fail to replace either Gylfi Sigurdsson or Fernando Llorente, he didn’t sell the club off to a 27-person American consortium behind communication with the Supporters’ Trust. The list of issues and problems just goes on and on.
So, where do we go from here? The Americans can bin their hopes to expand the stadium, they’ll find it so difficult now trying to bring in more commercial income. They’ll lose around £70m in TV money – tv money that they heavily relied upon to pay wages and other regular running costs.
How do they recover? The Championship is notoriously difficult to get out of, or easy if the desired destination is League One.
You can’t help but feel angry and frustrated by the position we’re now in. Yes, we’ve done brilliantly to manage seven consecutive seasons in the top flight, but we surely had the potential to make that eight and counting.
We’ve become complacent, greedy, and now, in hindsight, what was the point of selling to the Americans? They were meant to boost us, make us more money commercially and invest and build us, now you can forget all of that as a Championship club.
But all is not lost. You have to hope that now we’re definitely a Championship club next season, that we can bring some of the younger players through to the first team, and build a more exciting side with players that want to fight for the shirt.
Local lad Connor Roberts was clearly devastated when Southampton netted their winner on Tuesday night. It hurts. George Byers is another who would have felt the same. Oli McBurnie might not be a local lad but he’d at least give 100% every game and he’s shown that he can score goals at our new level. Players like Ki, Carroll and Andre Ayew won’t be much use in the Championship, there’s just no fight and guts between them.
You’d expect Fabianski and Mawson to move on this summer for as much money as possible to try and build something of a decent squad next season, though don’t be surprised if nowhere near the full amount received is re-invested in the squad.