Media reporting "back room reshuffle" at Liberty
In recent times the amount of media attention lavished upon our fair club by the international press has once again grown to a crescendo, though this time it's for all the wrong reasons. Of late, there has been incident after incident which have hardly painted the club in a positive light, and the latest news coming out of the Liberty is probably the most concerning so far. All the talk is that Garry Monk and academy coach Pep Clotet are set to take on more senior off-field roles, while the future of Morten Weighorst (Laudrup's no2) as well as Erik Larsen & Oscar Garcia now seems uncertain. Just what is going on?.
If all this talk is true, I really, really hope we already have someone lined up to replace Michael Laudrup, just in case he doesn't take kindly to this bit of back-room tinkery and does one. Would you blame him? Personally, I'd go one step further and I'd say it appears to me that certain factions of the board want Laudrup out, but don't want to have to pay him off. This move could well widen the rift between Laudrup & Huw, and the timing of it seems fairly catastrophic.
OK, if we win on Saturday I'm sure everything will be forgiven, no matter who is in charge, but did it really have to be done now? We've endured the Chico/Monk Brick-gate saga, then we signed Marvin Emnes, Chico again got in on the act by doing his best Platoon impression against West Ham and now...this? Right before the South Wales Derby? The timing really does seem strange.
I know the buck has to stop somewhere, and in that respect it's almost irrelevant who's in charge/working behind the scenes come matchday, but as stated above I really, really hope we're immaculately prepared for Laudrup's departure. Our backup plan of "Beg Graeme Jones to come in" doesn't seem likely to ever pay off, so there better be a couple more pokers in the fire lest we find ourselves getting burnt. Laudrup has found himself in the same situation before, and the last time his employers sacked his assistant Erik Larsen (at Mallorca) he resigned with immediate effect.
I'm sure this won't be the last we'll hear of this particular issue in the coming days, but hopefully we'll only be talking about football in the buildup to what could well be the most important South Wales Derby of all time. As Keith's excellent piece yesterday screamed - Swansea City needs you! Come matchday, all off-field issues need to be forgotten for ninety minutes as the Liberty tries to urge it's team to victory. The match is there to win, and we need to start turning our home stadium into a fortress again.
For now, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, I'm off to look at stats. They've been neglected of late, and I'm feeling a comparison of all our central midfielders...