Battling Swansea put safety in sight
This could have been tense for Swansea, when the pressure is so severe it squeezes the air from your lungs. When nerves are frayed and stomachs churn. When your heart hops, skips and jumps inside your chest. Instead it was easy, a breeze, a stroll.
Swansea could not have asked for more accommodating opponents in a must-win game. Sunderland went through the motions of making things difficult. Nothing more – and at times, considerably less. They are a shell of a football team, made up of frauds, flakes and fakes.
In some cases, they remain Sunderland players in name only because their minds, their interest, is already elsewhere. They capitulated as soon as Fernando Llorente gave Swansea an early lead.
Manager David Moyes takes his share of the blame – this is his relegation. He must take the ultimate responsibility because he has never looked or sounded like a man who believed it would not occur.
Only he knows if he still has the stomach to stay and put things right in the Championship, but the majority of supporters want him to go.
Swansea, though, have shown all the things his team have not in 2017: fight, spirit and belief. They have hauled themselves out of the drop zone at the ideal time. It is the sort of late relegation escape act that was Sunderland’s forte before this sorry surrender.
Swansea have flirted with relegation all season, dancing dangerously close to disaster, yet they will be able to look back and smile thanks to Paul Clement.
The Swans were bottom of the table, four points adrift, when he arrived at the start of the year, but have collected 26 points from his 18 games in charge and could be safe with a game to spare if Hull lose at Crystal Palace today
“I hope we have restored people’s pride in their football club,” said Clement, who stood on the pitch thumping his chest in front of the travelling supporters. “We don’t think we have done the job yet, we’ve got another game left, but it was a great moment at the end. You have to embrace moments like that. You have to enjoy them because that is what we work so hard for.
“Our last four results have been huge and they have come at a crucial stage of the season. All we can do now is wait to see what happens when Hull go to Crystal Palace, and there is a lot of pressure on both those teams now. We’ll all be watching it somewhere.”
If Hull’s Portuguese manager, Marco Silva, has surprised everyone with his success in English football, it is worth remembering nobody was sure Clement’s appointment was a good idea either.
He lasted eight months at Derby County, losing his first manager’s job because he could not get them into the automatic promotion places. There was a suspicion he was just another highly rated coach without the leadership skills to be a successful manager. But at the age of 45 he has done something remarkable in South Wales.
Sunderland offered little resistance, the fight draining from them as soon as they sensed the negativity inside the stadium. They have not won at home since December and the supporters who bothered to turn up to watch a team relegated weeks ago were in no mood to play the role of cheerleaders once cancer patient Bradley Lowery, who had been carried on to the pitch by his hero Jermain Defoe, was back with his family in the stands.
The atmosphere turned toxic almost immediately and some fans even decided to boo Darron Gibson when he came on as a substitute for the injured Jason Denayer after just 20 minutes.
Swansea were already in front at that point. John O’Shea and Denayer were both close enough to Llorente to be able to mark him, but the Spaniard held his ground in the middle and timed his jump perfectly to beat goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and meet Gylfi Sigurdsson’s free-kick.
“Jordan has been fantastic for us all season and I can only think of this one mistake,” said Sunderland manager David Moyes. “But I cannot see why he would come and try and claim the ball from a free-kick that was being taken near the halfway line.
“After that it was a difficult afternoon for us. It was disappointing because that is as bad as we have played in the last month or so. When that happens you are going to get that negativity [inside the stadium.] We are all embarrassed and disappointed.”
Sunderland did have a couple of halfchances, Didier Ndong slicing a shot wide early on before Billy Jones, unmarked, headed wide from 10 yards.
It was a let-off for Swansea but they made things comfortable for themselves at the end of the first half, when Ki Sung-yueng slipped a pass through to Kyle Naughton, who smashed a fine effort into the far corner.
Sunderland left the pitch to boos and chants of “we want Moyes out.”
Swansea looked as though they knew the job was done – and it was, even if the home team did miss a glorious chance to make things tricky after the break when Jones failed to hit the target from six yards.