This season’s Swansea are the same as the last few seasons Swansea, in that they are the very definition of mid-table. They’ve not threatened the playoffs or the relegation places all season and sit comfortably in 14th place with a record of two won, two drawn and two lost over the last six games. They tend to beat the teams at the bottom and tend to lose to the teams at the top and those last six games have borne that out with wins over Leicester and Portsmouth and defeats to Wrexham and Coventry.

The Wrexham defeat really stung because it made it look for a while like Wrexham we’re going to use that as a springboard to coast into the playoffs and continue their Hollywood infused upward trend. Needless to say, fans of Swansea don’t really share the media obsession with Wrexham and are firmly in the camp want them to crash and fucking burn. I think we became more popular in Swansea, when we put Wrexham back in their box with that 5-1 win.

So, another trip to Wales, this time to the South-West and whenever Saints and Swansea are in same conversation, the name of Russell Martin inevitably comes up. Russell lead Swansea to two mid-table finishes before getting the Saints job and there are some familiar players to the Swansea fans in our squad at the moment, namely Flynn Downes, Ryan Manning and Nathan Wood. Swansea‘s best player of recent seasons was Matt Grimes but he has moved on to Coventry and one assumes he will be a Premier League footballer next season. Swansea replaced him with Ethan Galbraith this season and the Northern Irishman has made a decent fist of filling that particular hole. He will be missing this afternoon, though with a season ending injury, which is certainly to our advantage. One player who will be a threat to us today is Zan Vipotnik, who is the top scorer in the Championship this year, with the majority of his goals coming at the Liberty Stadium. He was on the scoresheet away from home last week, as Leicester committed their entire team forward for a free kick before passing straight to the nearest Swansea player, who went straight up the other end of the pitch in about five seconds and Vipotnik crashed the ball into the top corner.

We could do without any of that today because what we need is a Swansea team that are on the beach and not feeling like giving us too hard a game. I’m sure that any suggestion of that would be immediately shut down by both managers Vitor Matos and Tonda Eckert. Matos took over from the hapless Alan Sheehan in November, which was after our first meeting of the season at St.Mary’s where we had a hundred shots and drew 0-0.

Eckert will have us well prepared for this game and will expect a performance from the squad. He won’t have his eyes elsewhere on other games, unlike the majority of us fans will, with Millwall at home to QPR kicking off at the same time. All we can do is concentrate on doing our own job, without which, results elsewhere are irrelevant.

A pattern is beginning to emerge with regard to team changes for certain games, so I think we can expect Flynn Downes, Casper Jander, Ross Stewart and Finn Azaz to be starting this game but whoever starts and finishes, with out current mometum, we can be sure that everyone will know what they have to do.