Swansea to renew bitter rivalry with Cardiff in derby laced with hostility
One of the quirks about the south Wales derby is that more than a century on from the first meeting of Swansea and Cardiff at the Vetch Field in 1912, neither team have done the league double.
A lot has changed since the bitter rivals last met five years ago in the Premier League, when Garry Monk took charge of his maiden game as a manager against Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who was a month into his short-lived Cardiff tenure. Wilfried Zaha and Craig Bellamy flanked Kenwyne Jones in Cardiff’s forward line, while Marvin Emnes and Wilfried Bony spearheaded Swansea’s attack, with the latter rounding off the scoring in a 3-0 win. “I wouldn’t have got out of here alive if I’d lost that game,” said Monk.
The teams will renew battle for the 108th time in the Championship at the Liberty Stadium on Sunday lunchtime and few understand the deep-rooted rivalry better than the former Swansea defender Ángel Rangel, who has played in the past nine meetings, including the final derby at Ninian Park in 2009, which dominated the headlines for the wrong reasons.
“It was pretty eventful,” says Rangel, now of QPR. “Jordi [Gómez] was on the floor after winning a foul and I remember being on the same side of the pitch, where the fans were very, very hostile. The amount of coins that flew over my head was incredible. Mike Dean was the referee and he had a cut on his head from one of the coins.
“We had to stop the game because the pitch was full of coins and, because of security reasons, after the game we actually had to stay in the changing room for about 35-45 minutes. We were not allowed to go back out until the whole stadium and the surroundings were clear.”
For Rangel, whose wife and three children live in Swansea, there is no shortage of derby memories, from trying to shackle Bellamy and Zaha – “I made sure I showed him what the derby was about; a couple of kicks for the first couple of balls he got” – to learning the “swim away” (a breaststroke action that Swansea have goaded their rivals with since chasing a group of Cardiff fans into the sea after a game at the Vetch in 1988) and going in goal after Michel Vorm was sent off in a 1-0 defeat at Cardiff six years ago.
“I remember Jonjo Shelvey wanted to go in goal and I said: ‘Jonjo, you’re one of those players that can score a goal for us and we can maybe get a point. I’m a full-back, I’m not going to be able to contribute as much going forward and we’re chasing the game,’” the Spaniard says. “So, I went in goal and as soon as I go in goal, there is a free-kick outside the box for them.
“I was like: ‘Oh no, here we go.’ It was [Peter] Whittingham at the time but luckily it went quite central and it went out for a corner. But I kept a clean
sheet in that seven minutes I was in goal and the day after I went to the changing room and I had a parcel with a couple of pairs of gloves waiting for me from a goalkeeping gloves company.”
Those matches carried extra weight for Bellamy, who was born in Cardiff, and there are a number of homegrown players in the current Swansea ranks who have grown up with the rivalry, including Joe Rodon, who was born on the outskirts of the city in Llangyfelach, and Connor Roberts, who hails from Neath. “There’s going to be an added buzz for them,” says Kristian O’Leary, the former Swansea defender and coach who grew up in Port Talbot, 10 miles east of the city. “If you’re on the right end of the result, it’s a great feeling. In those days you’d go out in town and you’d be heroes.”
At the first derby O’Leary was involved in, during December 1996, no away fans were allowed into Ninian Park after violence reached a tipping point. “I remember Jan Molby was in charge and he was shouting on to one of the players at the end: ‘You’re 3-1 up, instead of hanging about just get off the pitch,’” he recalls. “It was an intense affair but an enjoyable one. You wanted to be involved in those games – it’s the first fixture anyone looks at.”
The Liberty’s tunnel may not be as tight a squeeze as the one at the Vetch but Sunday promises to be a special occasion on a bumper day of Welsh sport. Several pubs, as well as the ground’s hospitality lounges, will screen the rugby World Cup semifinal against South Africa. South Wales police say this weekend’s operation will be “less restrictive” than in previous years but 1,650 away fans will be escorted to the Liberty Stadium from a designated point near the Penllergaer service station at Junction 47 of the M4, where they will exchange travel vouchers for tickets for a sold-out game.
For Swansea, who have won once since August, it represents the perfect occasion to get Tuesday’s 3-0 home defeat by Brentford out of their system, while it is an opportunity for a Cardiff side that have largely flattered to deceive to lay down a marker. A clash of styles is to be expected, with the 39-year-old Swansea head coach Steve Cooper priming his team for battle against an attritional Cardiff led by Neil Warnock, who turns 71 in December.
Ben Turner, the former Cardiff defender who was on the losing side the last time the sides met, recalls items smacking the coach windows on approach to the stadium. If Cardiff lose, the bus journey home is guaranteed to be a muted affair, as Turner can testify.
“It wasn’t one of those games where you could go: ‘Oh well lads, on to the next one,’” Turner says. “It hurt us a lot. As much as we deserved the home win [in 2013-14], the away defeat we deserved. We were simply not good enough. We felt almost pathetic coming home at how we hadn’t performed. If you lose a big game and you were unfortunate or there are positives to take, people talk on the bus about how it could have been different or where it got away from you but I remember on the way back it was pretty much silent. Everyone was deeply, deeply gutted. It sounds crazy but it was almost as if we needed to mourn it a little bit before we spoke.”