Clement: We Might Have To Start Winning Ugly

Under pressure Swansea City head coach Paul Clement says his team might have to ‘win ugly’ to ‘end vicious cycle’.

Because losing ugly is getting boring isn’t it Paul?

Paul’s recent comments seem to imply that we’re losing trying to play decent football, and that we have to change our style – to be ugly but effective at winning games.

We are playing the worst possible kind of football possible, and now we need to start winning ugly!? Drawing ugly would be a start. Scoring goals, taking shots, taking decent set pieces would also be a start.

After yet another sh*t shower of a performance on our own soil, Clement said:

‘The responsibility is down to me, the staff and the players. We will continue to work hard. We need to find a way to work even harder.

‘We might have to grind a result out somewhere, we might have to win ugly just to stop this vicious cycle of poor performance, bad result, poor performance, bad result.

‘A lot of the players in this group have been in this situation before and we have belief we can get out of it, but we don’t want this continuing on and on and on. We have to do something about it soon.’

Might’n we? That would be great if we could Paul.

Things turned sour during Saturday’s game as the fans turned on the club’s owners. Clement commented that the atmosphere affected some players:

‘I think it affected the team, I think it affected some individuals, but our job is to deal with that,’

‘We’re professionals, we have to be able to deal with good times, bad times, times of indifference. At the moment we’re in a really bad moment, no question about it. But together, with me at the front, we have to find a way to get a victory.

‘We’ve lost seven games now, six games by a goal, the margin of the results is tight but the level of that performance, I can’t say we deserved anything.’

I don’t know how many times Paul Clement has to keep talking about the margins that we are losing by. We might well be losing games by the odd goal, but the fact is that the opposition don’t need to win games against us by more than 1 goal. We don’t have goals in us ourselves, so 1-goal margins are always going to be enough to sit on for any length of time.

Arsenal and Leicester recently beat us by the odd goal but both teams should have at least got 3 or 4. The others, Newcastle, Watford, Brighton – 2 promoted teams and a Watford side that didn’t look as good as what they’ve now become under Silva.

We are losing games and that’s the bottom line. Clement would like to comment and make out that we’re not far away from getting good results simply because of these ‘margins’ is naive and somewhat deluded to say the least. The problems on the pitch can be listed, the problems off it could be made into a book.

There’s nothing we can do about the playing squad until January, and the club now have to decide if Paul Clement is the best man available for the job up until then or do we need something different to work with the players that will no doubt be given to him in the New Year.