Carvalhal heads for exit after his flops crumble

AND that’s the end of that. A club who swaggered, cool and a bit different, into this party seven years ago depart in dishevelled chaos, clattering the doorframe on their way out. What a sad end for Swansea. Goodbye or see you later? Who knows if they will ever get back into the Premier League again and who knows where Carlos Carvalhal will be next season. He maintains there is a chance he could be at the Liberty Stadium. The view of prominent figures at this troubled club is that it simply will not happen, as Sportsmail revealed last week. What a mess and yet how fitting for Swansea’s woefully miserable season, which culminated without even an attempt to pull off what Carvalhal had termed the ‘miracle’. By his estimation, their chance of landing the 10-goal swing needed to stay up was 0.01 per cent, but his actions made it less than that. That, though, is the past, just like their Premier League status. Carvalhal gave Angel Rangel his first start since December, a sentimental farewell to a club stalwart, and likewise let Leon Britton have half an hour for his goodbye as well. There were also starts for Nathan Dyer and Wayne Routledge, so this really was nothing like his strongest team and nothing like the actions of a man who wanted to stick a finger up at certain relegation. They led through Andy King, but then Badou Ndiaye equalised before Peter Crouch headed the winner. It might have been worse but Xherdan Shaqiri had a second-half penalty saved by Lukasz Fabianski before a flurry of Swansea chances stayed out, sealing a fifth straight defeat. Carvalhal made his excuses and read from a sheet of statistics to argue his case, namely that they won more points in his 18 league games than six other clubs. True. But equally they capitulated terribly in the final nine of those, and he couldn’t get a point from a run-in that read Bournemouth, Southampton, Stoke.