After previously flying high in the footballing fair play rankings, why are we now down near the bottom?
Well, this is a bit strange. Since arriving in the Premier League, and even further back if we're being honest, the Swans have attracted their fair share of plaudits from neutrals up and down the country. With an easy on the eye style of football and a seeming respect for the officials, we actually won the PL fair play league in our first Premiership season (link) - a league table based on red and yellow cards, positive play, respect towards opponents, respect towards the referee and behaviour of the team officials, while delegates also "assess the behaviour of fans with points being awarded for positive verbal support and recognition of outstanding play by the opposition".
Brendan Rodgers departed for Liverpool, and under Laudrup we seemingly continued with the easy on the eye football with Michu drawing understandable praise thanks to his general goal plundery. As far as the fair play stakes go, however, we started to slide. Come the end of the season, the 2012/13 fair play table looked like this:
In fairness, that's not a bad representation of how you'd order the teams if asked to do it yourself, without knowing how the officials actually totalled it up. That being said that we'd slipped so far comes as a surprise to me, and I don't remember anyone mentioning it at the end of last season.
So, fast forward to where we currently find ourselves, and we've dropped even further! It's quite hard to accurately say exactly where we are sitting at present - the official PL site's link (here) hasn't been updated in almost a month but has us listed as 17th. Meanwhile, the FA's site (here) and ESPN both have us languishing lower - however they seem to be taking cup games into account so due to our early exit from the League Cup we're credited with 14 games compared to many others' 16.
Either way, I do find it remarkable we can go from winning the fair play league to nigh on propping it up in such a short space of time. What's happened? I'm sure I remember statements in the past about how "We're Swansea City - we don't give the referee grief" and that, generally, our players conducted themselves with a good level of decorum. Are we still doing that?
I can't say I think we're worse than any other side, but a worrying statistic appeared before the Cardiff game showing that we'd had four yellow cards for dissent already this season - the most in the league at that point - and that was a month ago. I know it's hard when decisions don't go your way, but these bookings will add up and with squad rotation already a necessity due to both the fixture list and injuries to key players, we really can't afford to start missing players through suspension.
It seems that while we could still tenuously cling to the title of "media darlings", as far as the powers that be go there are a lot of teams earning better reviews at the moment. I doubt though, that anyone really cares who finishes bottom of the fair play table. I'd certainly rather finish bottom of the fair play table if it meant a guaranteed midtable finish in the actual table.