JUBILATION FOR SWANSEA CITY
Club will stay in Premier League next season as manager praises team and fans
THERE were many who were adamant Swansea City missed a trick when they failed to appoint Sam Allardyce, convinced the survival specialist was the man needed to keep the club in the Premier League.
In a way, they ended up being half-right.
The big win for Big Sam’s Palace over Hull proved to be the decisive moment in guaranteeing Premier League football at the Liberty for another year. The 4-0 defeat of the Tigers that ensured there would be no clawing back of Swansea’s survival advantage also ensured top-flight football will be played for the seventh season in a row in the white half of south Wales.
But, while Allardyce inadvertently ended up playing a part in Swansea’s safety, it should be plainly obvious to anyone that the reason the club will be among the elite next year is Paul Clement.
In a season of bad decisions, the one the club simply had to get right proved to be the – belated – correct call that saved them from their own mistakes.
While it may be understandable for some to have wanted to have been part of the scramble for the unemployed Allardyce – especially seeing how grim the whole situation felt back in December – it could hardly have been called a natural fit. It would have stunk of a short-term fix, the kind of choice that placed Swansea into problems from day one of this campaign.
Instead, in Clement, Swansea have someone who feels like a Swansea manager, who speaks and acts like a Swansea manager, who has shaken off those doubts in his ability to step up from being a No.2 by what he has done as a Swansea manager.
This is not meant to be critical of Allardyce – he achieved his own aims with the Eagles after all – but Swansea needed to press reset and go back to what made them what they are.
In bringing in Clement, Swansea, thankfully, eventually, did exactly that.
No-one should overlook the transformation that has happened under his charge. The statistics scream it out – the eight wins from 18 games, the shoring up of a defence that even now is the most leaky to have ever avoided relegation, the fact they are one of very few sides to have been bottom at the turn of the year and
still survive. Not forgetting, of course, the one that mattered most: the amassing of 26 points – more than double the figure they’d managed in the 19 games beforehand.
They are the ones you can see on paper, but that is only the end product. The work on the training ground, the building of a belief and a togetherness when there was none, the moving on from players shaking heads at the shambles at the start of the season into having full faith in what was being laid out. Incredible improvements such as not conceding a goal from a set-piece since Clement’s appointment. It doesn’t happen by accident. Diligent, detailed, determined – it all delivered.
That the achievements don’t seem to have been given the credit they deserve may be down to the fact he made such a superb start to life in South Wales, only for him to have to prove himself all over again when that run of six games yielded just one point and tested his inexperience.
Crucially, he learned lessons in that period and put them into practice when the room for error had been removed. Now it is the time for the club as a whole to learn lessons. Hopefully, the fact they went for Clement, pushed the reset button and returned to Swansea’s way of doing things suggests there is an awareness of that vital approach.
Because if they don’t, the celebrations for this survival will all seem a little pointless a year down the line.
There are countless examples of sides who have survived late on in a season only to find themselves back in familiar fear of the drop within months.
Sunderland are the latest example of a club only being able to get away with scraping by for so long.
There needs to be some tough introspection at the Liberty as to why things were allowed to slide to such a level, why recruitment has reached a point where it has failed more than it has succeeded – and that’s just the start.
Because if the pats on the backs and the roars of relief are totally and utterly justified, given the state of things as 2016 ended, this needs to be the wake-up call that Premier League status cannot be taken for granted. Not at a club of Swansea’s stature.
Seven successive seasons at this level is a huge achievement on one front and – despite the anger of some at times this year – there should be no sense of entitlement at the Liberty about needing to battle and battle hard to stay in this division.
But there should be a sense that the work of a manager and a group of players he galvanised must now be capitalised upon.
The right man in place needs to be given the right resources and the right support to improve himself and improve the squad.
Clement, of course, has attempted to take the spotlight off himself and shine a light on the step-up in character, commitment and quality when it was so badly needed.
And it is true that the players’s efforts in recent weeks have done much to bring back a connection that seemed lost earlier in the year. Embodied by Leon Britton – excellent once again at Sunderland in front of the 3,000 travelling fans he organised free tickets for – the bond of belief against the odds was back. You knew they would not let it slip, not from the off, not from the moment Fernando Llorente was found, once more, by Gylfi Sigurdsson and headed his 14th goal of the season.
Llorente was one who needed to step up when the concerns came flooding back after Watford, frustrating everyone with his output because you knew he was capable of more. So it has proved.
Players bought into what was being asked of them, showed a willingness to make that extra sprint or tackle, all illustrated in the team goal finished superbly by Kyle Naughton which sealed the win that – ultimately – secured safety. Hymns and Arias belted out, prayers answered.
It should all be celebrated next week against West Brom, both the achievement of turning around a season that seemed destined for disaster, and the opportunity to build under a manager that fits a future Swansea City need to aim for.
With Clement at the helm, there is a sense that the club is in a better place than it was this time last year. The aim from all must be that the same can be said in a year’s time.