HOTEL SNUB FIRED US UP, SAYS HUGHES
BEFORE the handshakes and wine came the shaking fists and a whine. Never let it be said that Mark Hughes lacks his old spark; never let it be said that Wales will blindly roll out a welcoming committee for one of their own. That is not to say that there were dirty tricks at play, just that it looked an awful lot like it. The full truth of the Marriott and its virus may never be known, likewise the tale of the parked bus and Southampton’s walk to the ground. A bit like the mysteries of the lasagne that once blew a hole in Tottenham’s collective stomach. It will just be an addition to that genre of folklore — that time Southampton were told there was no room at the inn. To listen to Hughes on the subject was quite something. ‘Actually, they’ve done us a favour,’ he said before the game. ‘The Swansea Marriott is one of the poorest hotels we’ve stayed in.’ By then he was pretty peeved and it wasn’t just because of the late cancellation of 40 rooms by the hotel, owing to a virus that didn’t seem to affect others booking the same night. And it wasn’t just down to the longer bus journey through rush-hour traffic to get to the Liberty Stadium from the Vale Resort just outside Cardiff. No. For there was also the suggestion that a call was made to the Southampton bus as it approached the ground to say there were going to have to wait onboard for 25 minutes while Swansea unloaded gear from theirs. All is fair in love and relegation scraps, as they say. In this instance, Hughes is said to have ordered his driver to stop and told the squad to walk. As Hughes put it after the game: ‘I am not suggesting for one minute that Swansea had anything to do with that (the hotel) but maybe over-zealous Swansea fans were in positions to affect our hotel booking. ‘Those things you use as a motivating factor and we got held up a bit outside the ground as well. We were first here and we were supposed to wait for Swansea. We weren’t going to do that. We were too focused so we got off the bus and walked the 100 yards into the ground as well.’ A nice edge to those words after a game that was largely disappointingly blunt. Hughes also spikily replied to comments from Stoke owners PeterP and John Coates, who said they should have sacked Hughes earlier than January, saying: ‘I am not without blame but people need to look closer to home sometimes.’ The tragedy is that we are talking about two so-called model clubs who have broken down into small pieces. The problem has always appeared greater at Swansea, irrespective of this result. Indeed, the outcome was never going to change the need for self-reflection at each club, come what may. But in the case of Southampton you could at least argue this has been a sudden fall from grace. For Swansea this has been a long time coming. Last night Carlos Carvalhal was back talking about the need for ‘miracles’. Yet it is about poor judgement over the past four years. They came so close to relegation in the past two seasons that they sacked managers and they sacked another this time. So far it doesn’t look like it did the trick. A real case of a bus running off the road, if you prefer.