Quiet late train ride home from work. What better to do than quickly get this in before my phone battery dies.
When I was at work today I had to, as always, keep an eye on updates from the Monday night Premier League match. Football's happening, I have to know what's going on. The Sam Allardyce revival continued for Everton, 3-1 winners against Swansea.
Swansea are interesting. They are bottom of the league and looking like dead certainties for relegation. For a number of weeks as they not so much as slid down the table but stayed near the bottom, their manager, Paul Clement, got away with doing a Roy Hodgson. As (Dutch) managers around him were sacked because it looked like they had blown a lot of money and their teams were at the wrong end of the table, nobody said a word about Clement. Just like when Hodgson managed England, not very well, and he seemed to be immune from any criticism. "Because we are rebuilding" and all that.
Now the proverbial knives have slowly started coming out for Clement. But I saw many online comments today about how the club needs stability and all he needs is some money for new players in January. Maybe he can talk to Ronald Koeman for advice on that strategy. One comment also mentioned how the club shouldn't spend any money and let the team get relegated. "The club needs to suffer and start from scratch"
Huh? Says my slightly uninformed brain. Uninformed because I don't want to risk wasting battery on looking up how long Swansea have been in the Premier League. But they are definitely not at the point of needing to start again. Aston Villa needed that: a club that had been suffering for a while and needed to know what relegation felt like to give the whole club a good kick up the backside. Swansea spent years in the wilderness. They went from the old fourth division to the Premier League in a relatively short time. They need to get their act together and get back to their relatively successful Laudrup and Monk days.
The Swansea case raises the question: how long does it take a smaller club to go from surprise team punching above its weight, to established top division team, to challengers (maybe) for top spots in the Premier League, or similar, to team on the decline, to team needing a re-build?
Burnley, anyone?
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