The firemen’ are all taken so the burning question is... What will Swans do now?
THE fact that another young British manager has been sacked at a time when the old guard are pulling up trees is totally deflating.
Paul Clement gone from Swansea, while Roy Hodgson, Sam Allardyce and David Moyes are turning things round in some style at Crystal Palace, Everton and West Ham.
Credit to them for that, because I have been critical of Allardyce and Moyes over the past couple of years.
But they are doing the business and proving there is life in the old dogs yet.
Allardyce, in particular, has an aura of, “Don’t worry, Big’s Sam’s here to sort things out”, and that can seriously relax players.
Nonsense
And what will be equally impressive about all three of them is that they will have gone in and only really said some very basic, simple things. story. It certainly won’t be the case with Allardyce, Hodgson and Moyes.
They will go out on the training ground and it will be drills, drills, drills, lots of shape work, full XIs versus the Under-23s, drilling the back four, then drilling them and again, and giving them that little belief, that little hug or that kick up the backside that will be worth its weight in gold.
It’s management basics and it works, at least for a year or so, maybe a little less, when players start to ask, “What next?”.
That is when we will see if those three are really going to sink or swim, but, on the whole, it is looking good so far.
What is odd is that you probably have to lose eight or nine jobs to be seen as experienced, or before players will look at you and say, “Well, he has been around the block so I can trust him”.
And perhaps that is one of the t hings which hurt Clement in the end.
I wrote in this column, a year ago, when he took over f rom Bob Bradley, that I did not think he was the right man for the job. But rather than looking at it and saying Clement wasn’t fit for purpose and throwing him under the bus, I lay the blame for how things have gone squarely with Swansea’s ownership.
Gylfi Sigurdsson and Fernando Llorente, with one or two others, were allowed to leave without adequate replacements being brought in.
And it looks to be another damning case of American owners bowling in to a football club and things heading south almost immediately.
Swansea were always a football club The ownership structure at Swansea has ripped the heart out of a club that was a home for playing great football and a home for waifs and strays like Leon Britton and Garry Monk. They have gone from being an outfit which brought t hrough dynamic young players and bought well on a proper budget to being just another side that has had its fingers burnt. And, with all the firefighters already back in work, it will be interesting to see where they go from here.