With over half the match played with ten men we came damn close to getting a result against an organised Southampton side
The one thing you'd say about Wilfried Bony is you can't doubt his commitment. He's never afraid to go in for a challenge, and mixes it with defenders who normally have it very much their own way against strikers who very rarely measure up physically. He's usually so composed, a force of nature who moves exclusively at his own pace like an ocean toing and froing, occasionally crashing on a shoreline with varying degrees of "thump", that it really was a turnup for the books when he lost his cool a little on the weekend.
It had been coming though. He'd just been clattered and there'd already been lots of "argy-bargy" between himself and the two Saints centre-backs, indeed Jose Fonte can count himself lucky to have not been dismissed too after a wild lunge which Wayne Routledge did well to avoid, with Fonte already on a yellow. That being said there was no arguing with either of Bony's yellows, and he deserved to see red.
The rest of the game would be very easy to view negatively. The boos at half-time were roundly directed at the referee, but the reaction I've seen from a lot of Swansea fans following the final whistle doesn't tally well with what I was thinking as I wandered away from the Liberty Stadium. The general reaction seemed to be "Monk missed a trick - we should have brought Gomis on earlier" but was it an option? I've been told Gomis emerged later than the rest of the squad on Saturday and could be seen discussing something with two coaches animatedly - god knows what that was being talked about but it does seem strange Emnes was preferred to him, when a big striker who could offer a focal point would seem by far the more natural option.
Whether there's anything in that I can't say, but after originally having my doubts about remaining "as is" by the seventieth minute I was pretty confident we'd be able to see the game out at 0-0. Against Southampton that would have been a seriously good result. Sadly Wanyama came off the bench to secure victory for the Saints, and as Monk commented after the game that was the one time our concentration lapsed. Other than that Southampton had been restricted to speculative efforts - as the image below shows they managed just four shots on target in the entire ninety minutes, and just prior to their goal I'd genuinely started to believe we were going to hold on for 0-0.
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| Southampton shots on target. Images from FourFourTwo StatsZone |
We also made a heroic amount of clearances. As you can see from the images below Southampton made 13 out of 13 - the Swans? A massive 42 out of 42 successful. The shape and rigidity of our system saw us frustrate the Saints and it was one lapse of concentration from the otherwise excellent Ki which ultimately saw us pay the price for sitting so deep.
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| Southampton clearances |
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| Swansea clearances |
By sitting so deep in the second half it meant that we invited pressure on to us, but I'd say we dealt with it very well. That's a massive positive - I think that's the grittiest, most determined rearguard action we've seen in some time and that we came so close while obviously offering very little in attack says a lot about the players' desire to work for the team, and to maintain the system put in place, in order to secure a result. You could see Sigurdsson shouting at his teammates in order that they press higher and harder, and if we have leaders like that all over the field we'll continue to improve.
I'm obviously gutted about the result, but the performance didn't worry me at all. I thought we showed a lot of encouraging signs, and until the sending off we were undoubtedly the better team. Maybe we should have pushed on, maybe we shouldn't. Either way, I'm still confident that we'll do well this season.