With both teams under the cosh, a draw certainly wasn’t going to prove fruitful in this match. Anything besides three points would have been worthless in the business end of the season. Fighting to keep their status as the only Welsh team in the Premier League, Swansea need to start winning games. At the end of the day, that is all that counts. Truth be told, this match was hardly the game of the century. We definitely deserved to win, but should have performed considerably better. With so much at stake, it was unsurprising that both sides made a cagey start.
Comparisons can be drawn between this game and a game of chess. Now, in order to play chess effectively, you need to consider strategy and tactics. A strategy is, simply put, a game plan. Slav decided to rest both Sakho and Carroll and opted for Ayew up front. Why did he even put them on the bench if he wasn’t going to use them? Perhaps it was a bluff, so as to convince Paul Clement that Bilic was going to change the formation around later? In any case, Andy Carroll has scored five times and assisted another three goals in his last six Premier League games against the Swans. No doubt Clement must have spat out the orange he was eating upon noticing that the man, who has terrorised their defence in the past, isn’t even playing!
Like with any game of football, there will be a game plan to start performing well immediately – especially against similar opposition. However, performance anxiety, as well as other factors, will make it harder to achieve that. Likewise in chess, you may have a certain strategy in mind that you can’t implement because your opponent has started out differently to how you initially expected. As ever, it is vital that both players follow the basics. This partly involves being able to think about the long-term plans for future play (“What will my opponent do next?”,“What should I do next?”). For instance, since we know that Fonte is slow, perhaps he should have adjusted his positioning? This was the game plan, of course, but he couldn’t follow it.
Finally, the best comparison I can give is with Kouyaté’s goal. I’ve saved the best for last. The Senegalese midfielder tends to play fairly deep, so when he went on his run from the back and scored, it was as if he was promoted from pawn to knight in shining armour. Nobody expects the pawn (or holding midfielder) to reach the other end of the board and capture a piece, yet that is what he did. The transformation was huge. In fact, it was what won us the game! Or as Kouyaté would prefer, Cheik-mate, before rolling onto the floor laughing.
Going into our match against Burnley back in December, we were 17th. Our next two matches were against Hull and Swansea, two teams that were in the relegation zone at the time. We thought that we simply had to win to avoid relegation. The truth of the matter is that we were never going to be relegated; we just wanted to get higher up the table, which is understandable. Losing this match to Swansea was never going to make us contenders for relegation, but it was simply about picking up form. We were unhappy with two 1-0 wins against Burnley and Hull last year, but it’s worth keeping in mind that a win’s a win. We’ve had our bad luck, so expect the good now. No doubt the post will be MOTM next week!
With wins usually come unchanged starting line-ups. However, I would advocate that we start Adrián. There was a moment in the match, in which I thought that we might concede from the corner. There were a lot of players in the box and Randolph was not at ease. The ball came in with a large chunk of the goal open and with Leroy Fer in adequate space. Fortunately, he couldn’t get onto it, otherwise we would have conceded. Prior to this game, the last time we kept a clean sheet was 11 matches ago. Randolph was partly to blame for the late equaliser from the corner against West Brom and would have been again. Neither of our keepers are ideal so we need to keep continually rotating them.
This was one of our best defensive performances. James Collins and Sam Byram, in particular, were terrific. In total, 24 headed clearances were made. Ginge should be very proud of his performance. He made sure that he got onto every ball and headed or cleared it away. Carroll must have been watching on in delight. Furthermore, Byram was voted MOTM on the Club’s Twitter account. In my opinion, he deserved it, as he played extremely well making sure that tackles were made and that the wing-play was intricate and unpredictable. At the end, he blocked Sigurdsson’s cross out for a goal kick preventing a late corner. What I immediately noticed was the no. 23 on Sigurdsson’s shirt: Byram is 23 and is already integrating with the squad. The message here is never write players off.
I personally believe that Slaven did the right thing in not subbing Sakho or Carroll on. I know that it is strange to say, given that we won, but the risk of subbing any of these two injury-prone players is just too much. Antonio is someone who is very good at recovering from injuries, so there isn’t much concern there, but given that we don’t have many options up front, we can’t afford to lose what we already have.
Captain fantastic.@Noble16Mark joined an illustrious group today#The400Club #COYI pic.twitter.com/FFbvzapzTT
— West Ham United (@WestHamUtd) April 8, 2017
If we win against Sunderland, we can pretty much confirm Premier League football next season. I’m sure the Mackems will be delighted the Geordie Horse will be back in town. The Black Cats have failed to score in their last six matches, so I’m sure Big Andy will bring his goalscoring boots along. Joking aside, this is a fixture we really ought to win: the last Sunderland home win was back in December of last year! That said, I expect a scrappy win, despite the fact that they have lost five of their last six games. Simply put, we aren’t playing our best football at the moment, but are still better than our meagre opposition.