SPORTS WEEK #3 OF 5: WILFRIED & THE SWANS PREPARE FOR MAN U.

Wilfried Bony aka ‘Daddy Cool’

I support a small club, Swansea City, in the English Premier League, arguably the most competitive professional sports league in the world. The Swans will face Manchester United in the first fixture of the 2014-15 season, a daunting first opponent for many reasons. Aside from their storied past—20 top tier titles; the most in English football history—United finished a lackluster seventh in the table last year, having sacked their manager late in the campaign.  The Red Devils, therefore, will have something to prove, as they open the season at Old Trafford in front of more than 75,000 people. By contrast, the Swans will return from Manchester to play their first home fixture in front of 20,750 people at the Liberty Stadium in South Wales, but the differences between a big club, such as United, and a small club, such as Swansea, extend well beyond stadium seating capacity. A larger club, by virtue of its payroll and the profiles of its players, can expect to challenge for the league title, as well as entry into lucrative European club competitions, such as Champions League. The allure of winning titles and competing with other powerful European clubs often proves, to the star players and coaches on successful smaller teams, too difficult to resist. Smaller clubs enjoy little peacefulness from season to season, as their best performers receive offers from suitors across the continent.

Last year, the Swans themselves competed in Europa League, a demanding European club competition that unfolds in parallel with the domestic league calendar. Swansea traveled throughout the season to Sweden, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, and Italy, in addition to enduring physical matches in the Prem. The Italian giants, Napoli, who entered into Europa League after failing to advance in the more prestigious Champions League competition, eliminated the Swans, 3-1, in Naples, after the two sides played to a 0-0 draw in Wales. Swansea had bulked up for the Europa League mission, by adding players at most positions, but in the end, the schedule wearied and battered the club, and they found themselves drifting downward in the league table. At one juncture in the second half of the campaign, Swansea sat just two points above the drop. Had their fortunes continued to sour, they could have faced relegation to Football League Championship, the immediate under-tier to the Premier League, into which three clubs tumble every year, and from which, three teams climb every year. Just as Manchester United parted with manager David Moyes, the Swans board of directors, reeling from the club’s tepid performance, sacked their manager, the legendary former Danish star, Michael Laudrup, replacing him with favorite son Garry Monk, a 35 year-old defender still on the active roster.

Monk, a long-time Swansea captain with no managerial experience, led the club to a respectable record of 5 wins, 3 draws, and 6 losses after Laudrup’s departure, with a plus-6 goal difference over that stretch. (Laudrup had amassed a record of 6 wins, 6 draws, and 12 losses, with a minus-6 goal difference.) Swansea’s triumph at Sunderland on the final day of the season earned the club a 12th place finish in the table, but it didn’t quite erase the club’s yearlong struggles. Many players, including the previous year’s ace, Michu, faced layoffs with injuries. The club owned the ball during many of its matches, employing its trademark passing schemes, but the possession, at times, rang hollow, with the club unable to create opportunities. In addition, the Swans often conceded a maddening early goal. They produced fewer clean sheets (shutouts) than in previous seasons and only took two points from big clubs: an early draw with Liverpool, and a crucial draw at Arsenal, where Swansea stalwart Leon Britton carried the ball into the defense, forcing a late own goal to earn the point. Captain Ashley Williams anchored the team with 34 league starts, the most on the club. Williams, a defender, had played on the back line with Garry Monk, before Monk became the club’s manager. Nobody will forget Ash hugging Garry on the sidelines after the club took a 1-0 lead in the second Welsh derby versus Cardiff, Monk’s first game as gaffer.

Wayne Routledge scored that goal, before tallies by Nathan Dyer and Wilfried Bony gave the Swans a comfortable 3-0 triumph over their arch-rivals. Wilfried, the undeniable man of the year for Swansea, scored 16 league goals—with his feet; in the air; from the spot—for Swansea, none finer than a blistering inside-out strike versus Manchester City at the Liberty Stadium, as part of a 2-3 home loss. The Côte d’Ivoire international, who arrived at Swansea last year from Vitesse of the Dutch Eredivisie, would finish tied for sixth in the Premier League scoring race. It was, however, another player to join Swansea last year, Jonjo Shelvey, who would produce the club’s greatest highlight, a wonder goal blasted from 45 yards away, that broke a 1-1 home tie versus Aston Villa. Shelvey, who joined the club from Liverpool, also scored crackers against his former club at Anfield and against Newcastle at the Liberty Stadium. His distribution from midfield led to several assists and frequently opened up the field for his teammates. Other players, such as defenders Angel Rangel and Chico Flores, rewarded the club with valuable minutes, although supporters sometimes bristled at Chico’s histrionics. Still, Swansea scrabbled toward the end of the season, garnering points in the table, avoiding a relegation battle, and offering the kind of likability and intense promise that inspires the club’s ardent supporters.

Ash Williams embraces Garry Monk after
Swansea take a 1-0 lead against Cardiff.

I could write about Ben Davies’ and Michel Vorm’s departures to a wealthy London club, Tottenham, or the likelihood that Dutch World Cup star, Jonathan de Guzman, won’t return to Swansea, or how the club, once dubbed “Swansealona”, has rebuilt without its star, Michu, and many of its other Spanish players who emulated the Barcelona style of play. I could explain my fears that some big club, either in the Prem or perhaps the Bundesliga, will prize Wilfried from the Swans, depriving us hooligans of seeing him partner with Bafetimbi Gomis, a promising recent addition from French Ligue 1 side, Lyon. In the end, small club supporters don’t expect their sides to actually win the Premier League title, but instead, hope the team will achieve the highest possible finish outside the big clubs, or, in some miraculous way, maybe sixth or seventh, should one of the big clubs stumble. According to the Guardian, Swansea City spent £49 million on player wages in 2012-13, a scant 27 percent of what Man U spent, £181 million, in the same campaign. There is a very tangible underdog purity in seeing your scrappy club step onto the pitch against a heavily funded, heavily favored big club, with a growing possibility—now three years in the Premiership and counting—that Swansea City will compete for the win, the three points, every time they battle a colossus. I wish them well at United and for the new campaign. Up The Swans!

Sports Week #1 of 5: My Grandfather, Emil Ringel
Sports Week #2 of 5: The Landover Football Team
Sports Week #4 of 5: Who I Heckled As a Young Man
Sports Week #5 of 5: Draws

WINNING PLENTY BY PLACING 11TH: HOW SWANSEA CITY FOOTBALL CLUB TRIUMPHED IN 2011-12 (IF NOT BY AMERICAN STANDARDS.)

Danny Graham, after scoring his momentous goal versus Arsenal.

Many football players (outside the U.S.) contest their sport on the pitch, clad in either home or away kits, with the hopes that a good result in their weekly fixtures will propel their sides upward in the table. That sentence may dizzy the average American sportsman, who probably wouldn’t comprehend why the most powerful football league in the world—The English Premier League, or The Prem, for short—not only permits draws, but crowns a champion at the conclusion of its rugged 38-game season, without carving itself into subdivisions and orchestrating multiple layers of playoffs. Incentives do await for victorious soccer that may not capture a title, as the top few finishers in The Prem gain admission to a couple lucrative, continental club tournaments: Champions League and Europa League. In addition, and most notably, the bottom three teams in The Prem must endure relegation, or demotion to an under-tier, to the Football League Championship division, or ‘Championship’, the teams of which can suffer relegation, themselves, to a lower division, or vault into the big show of The Prem. (Multi-tiered football associations in other countries operate in similar fashion.) On the concept of survival, the punk band Wire conveniently shouted: “Avoiding a death is to win the game / To avoid relegation . . .” and “that’s the lowdown,” baby. That’s the climate.

Enter our side, Swansea City FC, a.k.a. The Swans, who became the first Welsh team to compete in the current version of The Prem, and just the 45th club overall to reach this uppermost tier in English football, formed in 1992. The lads climbed into the rarefied atmosphere of The Prem fresh from an elimination contest among four hopefuls from Championship, amidst forecasts of great calamity. In short, the soothsayers predicted a swift return to Championship for The Swans, averring they would finish 20th out of 20, a one-hit wonder. The Swans, therefore, approached the season without donning any ridiculous airs. Their coach, at the time, Brendan Rodgers, frequently reminded spectators and sports writers that the mission revolved around survival, i.e., placing 17th or higher. They would strive to persevere, with Rodgers’ guidance, by attempting to control possession of the ball in the Spanish style, within a system of triangular passing schemes. Synonyms for this variety of ball movement might include “The Beautiful Game” or “Total Football”—the latter championed by Dutch legend Johann Cruyff. After their first few matches, it also became clear that The Swans, in Michel Vorm, were fielding a world-class goalkeeper, an acrobatic athlete with top-shelf reflexes and superior instincts, who led Swansea to four blank sheets (shut-outs) in their first seven Prem League matches. Two of these, unfortunately, involved scoreless draws at home, where a side would hope to prevail, instead, but The Swans knocked off West Brom and Stoke City at home, before drifting into the middle portion of their schedule.

Would they survive, they would likely require at least one signature win versus a Goliath, and the first of three such milestones materialized on January 15th, at Liberty Stadium, where The Swans hosted a traditional powerhouse, London-based Arsenal. Swans Forward Danny Graham struck in the 70th minute, just seconds after Theo Wolcott had knotted the score at 2-all for Arsenal, a goal that might have otherwise doomed The Swans to pursue a draw. Vorm preserved the 3-2 lead with notable point-blank stops, and in defeating the Gunners, The Swans had toppled a former champion and perennial title contender. The Swans would have needs to prevail on the road, and did so, for the first time, versus Aston Villa a day beyond New Year’s, and later versus West Brom, Wigan, and Fulham. In addition to Vorm and Graham, other Swans distinguished themselves throughout the 2011-12 campaign: defender Ashley Williams; midfielders Joe Allen, Nathan Dyer, and slippery Scott Sinclair; and striker Gylfi Sigurdsson, the Icelandic international on loan. Luke Moore subbed versus Manchester City and defeated the eventual champions with a header, and in the season’s final fixture, Graham tallied against perennial powerhouse, Liverpool; both games at Liberty Stadium ended 1-nil to Swansea. The Swans did engage in some maddening giveaways, among them yielding an agonizing equalizer to Chelsea in added time, a match that concluded 1-1 in late January, yet any student of The Prem would reason that such giveaways, in moderation, don’t represent outliers, but organic moments that bedevil all sides in all seasons. The Chelsea result would deprive Vorm, ultimately, from collecting his 15th clean sheet, but by winding up with 14, the Swans tied Tottenham for fourth overall, a badge of remarkable defense.

As the campaign wore on, The Swans tired a bit, and suffered a four-game losing streak to Everton, Spurs, Newcastle, and arch-rival, QPR. They clawed out eight points, however, over their final five fixtures, with a respectable loss to second-place finishers, Manchester United, two shaky draws but important notches, nevertheless, in the table, and two wins, punctuated by Graham’s goal in the 86th minute versus The Reds, with four minutes to play in the season. After the whistle blew versus Liverpool, Swansea City FC had engineered a good bit more than merely weathering the league. The club placed 11th in The Premier League table, the best of its graduating class from Championship. We could label the 2011-12 Swansea campaign as one that culminated in “wild success” or “success beyond imagination” but The Swans produced, simply put, a winning season, despite dropping more contests (15) than they won (12). They drew 11 times. I would guess that most American sports fans would react by sniffing at such a sequence, reasoning that “winning is everything” and if a team doesn’t capture a Super Bowl title, for example, or World Series rings, their exploits matter about as much as a shuffleboard competition in South Beach. Perhaps Americans have grown accustomed to various professional sports teams mired in chronic tableaux of miserable decrepitude, with little incentive to do more than concern themselves with solvency. Many U.S. sports, true, have become dominated by an elite oligopoly of powerful teams, but nowhere in the NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB do lousy clubs have to stomach relegation to lower leagues, or do hungry clubs receive promotion to the top leagues. Given the big corporate shoulders of the New York Yankees, on the other hand, we might conclude that the underfunded Kansas City Royals, for example, finished pretty darned well, under the circumstances, in winning 71, 67, and 65 baseball games out of 162 games over the past three completed seasons, 2011, 2010, and 2009, respectively, but American culture doesn’t really reward that kind of spendthrift endurance, spiritually or otherwise.

If we consider that half the current Premier League football clubs have enjoyed lengthy, uninterrupted stretches in The Prem, then the odds of Swansea out-scrabbling the other nine sides—each with more experience than The Swans—still seemed a bit meager, but cohesive play and clutch performances trumped the doubters. Out-scrabbling, of course, can exact its own price, and extraordinary manager Brendan Rodgers has left the club for the vacant managerial post at Liverpool. The Swans responded by hiring former Danish footballing star, Michael Laudrup, a chap who’s managed in Spain’s La Liga, who endorses a style of play similar to that of 2011-12 Swansea. He and his roster of likable Prem League upstarts will tour the United States for three exhibitions in the month of July, and after that, face an away date at QPR on August 18th, for the kickoff to the 2012-13 Prem. Allegedly, if Swansea survive a second year in the Premier League, then its ownership may expand Liberty Stadium by thousands of seats. Beyond a second Prem League campaign, who knows? The team could compete for “a place in Europe”—entry into Champs League or Europa. To support Swansea City FC, simply say “Up The Swans!” as often as you’d like. That phrase goes better with Single Malt Welsh Whisky distilled by Penderyn, a going Welsh concern that should certainly belong to a Premier League of World Whisky Distilleries, and a brand that could, indeed, survive—and take it all! Up The Swans!

(This post dedicated to Doug Lang.)