The Swansea Way has once again dipped into the transfer market, and is pleased to introduce new contributor Dan Barnett of www.wearepremierleague.com. Dan loves stats even more than I do, so expect the amount of graphs featuring on the site to increase exponentially! Welcome aboard, Dan!
There's been plenty of mentions of 'brave' or 'battling' Swansea but for me that doesn't do justice to the performance over the two legs. Those words suggest a 'backs to the wall', blood and guts approach when in reality we created the better chances and had control of the two games for large periods.
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| Shots by minute from the 2nd leg: Napoli with early pressure but Swans with plenty of chances |
Over the two legs, Swansea had 20 shots on target to Napoli's 5, partly due to some poor attempts by Higuain.
Overall the Swans will be left with plenty of if-only's but the fact that there was no discernable difference in ability of the two teams is a huge credit to the team.
Sunday's game against Palace is a huge one, win and the feel-good factor continues and creates a decent sized cushion over the bottom teams, lose and it's 3 defeats in a row and people will start to get twitchy again especially given it'll be two weeks before the West Brom game with a number of other sides playing a game on 8th/9th March.
The main jobs for a manager are motivation and organisation and so far Monk has shown impressive qualities which will be needed again for the Palace match. As well as the change in atmosphere, there's also been a shift in approach which I'll look in to in more detail after the Palace game.
Check out Dan's website at www.wearepremierleague.com, or on Twitter @We_R_PL
All statistics used sourced from www.whoscored.com
All statistics used sourced from www.whoscored.com