Quite right and the way people bang on about Swansea it's hard to believe that there were only 4 points separating Stoke and Swansea at the end of last season!
An article on Swansea's playing style under Rodgers:
The myth of Swansea’s ‘attacking’ football
As Brendan Rodgers sat in his Match of the Day 2 swivel chair on Sunday night, he was on the receiving end of some well-deserved back slapping.
Despite indifferent recent form, Rodgers’ Swansea City team sit 12 points clear of the drop zone with three games left, and barring a minor miracle, will still be a Premier League team come August.
But as you will no doubt have heard a thousand times already, it has been Swansea’s style of play that has won them so many admirers, and put manager Rodgers (pictured) on the radar of some much bigger clubs.
And as the Northern Irishman sat between Robbie Savage and Alan Shearer, there was palpable embarrassment his face as his fellow pundits gave him a verbal round of applause.
To give Shearer and Savage credit, they never said it themselves, but all season pundits, journalists and commentators have eulogised about Swansea’s brand of football. It has been claimed more than once that Rodgers’ team are “the blueprint for promoted teams who play attacking football”.
Swansea do indeed play excellent football, I would go as far to say that they have played the most attractive football in the Premier League. But they do not play attacking football and I believe that pigeon holing them as such does them a great disservice.
The statistic that always gets wheeled out during any Swansea City game, win, lose or draw, is possession of the ball. The Swans will invariably have somewhere between 70-80% possession over 90 minutes, a quite incredible feat for a newly promoted side at this level. But their stats in specific areas of the pitch say as much about their playing style as 77% possession.
The definition of ‘attacking’ play
Stoke City are the only side with fewer total shots and shots on target than Brendan Rodgers’ team, while Manchester City are the only side to have completed more passes. What is attacking football if not a style of play with the onus on scoring goals? If a side with so much possession actively tries to score so rarely, how can they possibly fall into that category?
Their style of play is patient, possession-focused and utterly enthralling, but it is certainly not the cavalier near insanity of Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle or Ian Holloway’s Blackpool.
Not all work that a team does with the ball has the ultimate goal of getting the ball into the opponent’s net. What Swansea do brilliantly is that they get themselves into positions where another goal is simply unnecessary.
Once they are in a winning position, their intricate passing triangles and excellent use of space fundamentally become a sexy version of taking the ball into the corner. They keep the ball from the opposition so that the opposition cannot score. Essentially, they are defending while in possession of the ball.
I think that Leon Britton’s play this season proves this. For a long time, the favourite stat of Sky Sports was that the diminutive midfielder’s pass-completion ratio was the best in Europe, ahead of Barcelona’s Xavi and Iniesta.
A revelation, but...
Britton has undoubtedly been an absolute revelation, but the main reason that his passing stats have been even better than Xavi’s for much of the season is that they are trying to do very different things with the ball. The stats say it all: Britton: 0 goals, 0 assists. Xavi: 10 goals, 6 assists.
I concede that claiming that Leon Britton is no Xavi is a bit like kicking over your son’s sandcastle because it doesn’t have a drawbridge, but there is a serious point here. Both players are the midfield fulcrum of their teams, but while Xavi plays the ball forward, Britton plays the ball sideways. Having the ball is the priority, not necessarily scoring with it.
As a result, Blackburn have 47 goals, Swansea only 39. But Blackburn look odds-on for relegation, while Rodgers is already planning an assault on the top-half in 2012/13.
Fundamentally, I think that the main reason why the false labelling of Swansea’s football annoys me is that it just seems lazy to try to call it something familiar. I do not believe that it is in any way familiar.
I think that Rodgers has brought a style of play that we have never seen to the Premier League, and that we should recognise and acknowledge how incredible that is, rather than attempt to rationalise or normalise it.
When something is genuinely new, there isn’t a name for it yet. Why not just burn our labels, sit back and enjoy the show?
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Is Weir trying to copy Swansea's style? While we had a right back and a central midfielder out wide on Saturday, Swansea have always had pacey wingers and good forward movement. They also have full backs who can go forward, while we have McMahon and Hill who rarely contribute to our attacking play. Laudrup has apparantly upped their tempo a little.
They've been good at identifying situations when you
should bomb forward quickly before the opposition have time to regroup.If you watch Michu's goals last season they don't all come following 20 passes moves. There's lots of good movement, lots of crosses, lots of
forward passes, lots of good width. There are more things than rolling the ball across the back four that we can learn from them.
, whilst others can see the folly in that approach.
