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, Caspar 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.

South-West Wales, 2pm and the team news is pretty much as expected. Finn Azaz is fit but with knee strapping and I guess the only surprise is that Nathan Wood is starting and will no doubt pick a fight with Vipotnik. Away we go and our three ex-Swans all get booed by the home fans as they get their first touches. No shock there.

Swansea look up for it , but Saints manage to have an early moment through Matsuki and he sends Stewart away down the right, who bundles passed a really shit attempt to a challenge by Burgess and as he gets into the penalty area and every Saints fans yells or thinks “hit it”…. he tries to find either Azaz or Scienza and manages to find no one and the chance goes.

Swansea get about us for the next ten minutes and we seem to be having a little bit of difficulty sussing them out tactically but we survive that and it seems like we’re getting back on top before Swansea break and win a throw on the left. Eom throws it into Tymon, gets it back and then swings a deep cross to the back post which Bree thinks is going out of play but Vipotnik behind him has other ideas and heads it back into the mixer. Cabango goes for it and misses it but that dummies the defenders and keeper and Stamenic bundles it into the net. Shit. That wasn’t in the script.

Swansea have this annoying little shit in midfield called Widell, but he looks a half decent player as he nicks the ball off of Jander and sets off up the pitch. He carries it from halfway to about 30 yards out before letting fly and forcing Peretz into a low save, which he pushes wide for corner.

The annoying little shit is then at the centre of a bit of an incident as Downes piles in to try and win a loose ball. Franco hits the deck holding his face as he does, and Widell grabs Downes and the handbags start as they fall over. It’s all good fun and the referee decides on a yellow for both.

As we approach half time, we are not performing well at all. Caspar Jander is really struggling in midfield and Flynn Downes is running around like the preoverbial bull in a china shop like he really hasn’t calmed down from the earlier incident. We do pick the ball up on the left through Azaz and Matsuki plays the ball to the overlapping Bree who should really put his foot through it but instead, tries to side foot it to the far corner and Vigouroux gets down well to save comfortably.

Half time and that wasn’t great. We probably shaded it over the entire 45 minutes in terms of being the better side, but we really haven’t threatened much. Swansea seem to have settled into a pattern of just being happy to hit us on the break so it really is up to us to take the game by the scruff of the neck and the second half. I was expecting both Jander and Stewart to come off at half-time as they both been poor but instead, it’s Flynn Downes who comes off in a very obvious bit of red card avoidance, and Shea Charles comes on.

We start the second half with more intent with Manning feeding a nice ball into Jander deep into the Swansea penalty area and his effort is blocked away for a corner. In it comes from Scienza, a flappy bird impression by Vigouroux and the ball drops down with Charles, Azaz, Wood and then Matsuki all trying to shoot before Swansea eventually clear it. Needless to say there’s a player lying on the ground pretending to be injured and no surprise at all that it’s Gonzalo Franco. He’s lying on the ground pretending he’s been hit in the head and a replay shows that it’s hit him somewhere on the back. There should be retrospective punishments for this sort of shit.

We are getting better now with Swansea offering very little up front and Saints just probing for an opening. Matsuki swings in a left foot cross from the right and Stewart rises well to get his head on it and it was probably just about going over but Vigouroux makes sure. We take the corner short and it looks like we’ve made a bit of a bollocks of it and it ends up with Manning about 30 yards out. He plays it to Azaz on the left and Finn crosses, flicked on by Leo Scienza and there is Shea Charles, man on a mission, rising behind THB to head down and in for another massively huge goal. We’ve got 25 to go – let’s go on and fucking win this.

Different game now and Saints have all the momentum. Manning starts a move on the left, eventually combining with Scienza and Manning fires an absolute beauty of a ball along the 6 yard line and though we have three players in proximity, no one really commits and it flies past Azaz who is closest, and goes out the other side.

Stewart is replaced by Larin and Swansea break, through the dangerous Eom on the left and he runs diagonally towards a penalty area before exchanging passes with Vipotnik but the ball goes loose and Manning should clear it but instead of doing that, he has one of those ridiculous brain farts and tries some sort of spin turn on the edge of his own penalty area, gets tackled by Eom and the shot comes in from Nunes and Woody has to throw himself in the way of it. Why does Ryan Manning do this when I’m just beginning to trust him as a defender?

Vipotnik has been substituted, presumably because he’s not getting any change it all out of wood and his replacement Idah presents the ball straight to Charles, which enables us to break again until Azaz gets robbed and forward come Swansea, with Franco being found near the penalty spot and it’ll be too much if this little fucker scores but he turns and puts his effort foot a couple of feet wide of the post.

85, 86 and it really doesn’t look like it’s happening and then Tonda rolls the dice with Bree being removed and Cameron Archer coming on, carrying one hopes, the confidence from his performance against Blackburn in midweek.

And so it comes to pass that Manning picks the ball up on the left and plays it down the line to Scienza who perfectly flick it past ex-Skate Joel Ward to meet the run of Jander, who gets his head up and picks out a left foot cross to the back post which goes over Cyle Larin and there is Archer who meets it on the volley and arrows it into the bottom corner of the net past a flailing defender on the line who can’t keep it out. The shirt is off and everyone goes mental – somehow, substitute Jack Stephens is the first one there. Fucking brilliant strike. And a fucking hilarious attempt to keep it out on the goal line. Thankyou for crap players who can’t use their left foot.

Tonda sorts the ‘no right back’ issue by bringing on Captain Jack for Matsuki, and for good measure, Edozie is on for Leo and there are 6 minutes to go. These are negotiated without alarm, with Edozie running the ball into corners and Captain Jack making clearances and interceptions and all is calm as we play it out in front of a hastily emptying stadium.

I bet that our rivals for the automatic promotion spot were looking at the score at half-time and rubbing their hands at the fact that Swansea were winning and Saints weren’t playing particularly well. Fast forward an hour and they would’ve checked on the score and gone “oh fuck off.

It was a struggle but we got there. For Manolo Gabbiadini 2018, read Cameron Archer 2026. You would not have had Cameron Archer down to score a 90th minute winner on your bingo card but this is a season so far, where everybody in the squad is sticking their hand up at some point to make a difference in this promotion push. As predicted after the Blackburn game, Archer pushed himself up the pecking order to come on as a sub when we needed a goal, and so it proved with his volley being his first touch of the game.

The game hadn’t started particularly well with Saints looking somewhat sluggish and Swansea looking the better side, certainly for the first 15 minutes. Saints began to get a foothold in the game and then got done with a particularly crap goal which stemmed from a throw on the left. Our defending was dreadful as the cross came into the back post with James Bree thinking it was going out of play before Vipotnik headed it back into the middle for Stamenic to score. Saints huffed and puffed for the rest of the first half without really creating many opportunities and not working the goalkeeper, aside from a rather tame effort from Bree which he should’ve smashed. Swansea weren’t really doing anything either aside from one long range effort which Peretz saves 99 times out of 100 and this was one of the 99.

Swansea dwindled as an attacking force in the second half and it was mainly a case of whether Saints could find the breakthrough and the man with the golden touch with regards to important goals this season is Shea Charles who turned up in exactly the right place to head Leo Scienza’s flick on into the net of the far post. It looked like we were going to run out of time as we approached the 90 but with Archer thrown on for Bree, we just needed the one chance to fall and so it did as Jander’s cross from the left went over the top of Larin and there was Archer at the back post to drill a superb volley all the way along the ground which would’ve arrowed into the bottom corner of the net, but some of the aesthetics were taken away by a shit effort on the goal line by Fulton, including trying to keep the ball out of the net with his wrong foot. It’s on moments like this that promotion campaigns are forged.

We also have cause to be grateful today for officials not seeing things in such a way that could’ve been very detrimental to our cause. Flynn Downes was clearly fired up for his return to Swansea and was somewhat fortunate at the end of the first half when he went very heavily into a challenge and then appeared to go in with a forearm before ending up in a wrestling match with the little shit Swansea player. Yellow cards all round was probably the right decision but that really could’ve been down to 10 men and struggling. It was no surprise that he was taken off at halftime.

The other incident that went in our favour was Eom robbing the ball off of Nathan Wood on the left-hand side of our penalty area and then Woody grabbing him before letting go as Eom threw himself to the ground. Personally, I think it’s started outside the box, but usually that’s given as a foul and then the referee would’ve had a decision to make us to whether it was a penalty or not.

As mentioned, Tonda had to throw on Shea Charles at half-time for Flynn Downes and this seemed to wake up Caspar Jander who was terrible in the first half, but in the second half, he mopped everything up and drove the team forward. There’s a big difference between Casper playing well and playing badly and it’s strange to see illustrated so starkly in one game. Again, Tonda got the substitutions right with everyone contributing from Shea Charles and Cameron Archer getting the goals to Sam Edozie using up valuable time dribbling all the way up the pitch, Jack Stephens winning a couple of important challenges and Cyle Larin sprinting to the corners to win throw ins in the 93rd minute.

There was also the sub he didn’t make. Leo Scienza had been quiet for the first hour and it would have been no surprise if he’d been taken off but he was left on, set up the first with a flick on and then came alive when Matos brought on ex-Skate Joel Ward to mark him. One lovely flick to Caspar Jander later, one cross, one volley and we’ve won the game. You have to leave Leo on the pitch as long as you can.

Elsewhere, Millwall comfortably despatched QPR 2-0 and the big face of between Ipswich and Middlesbrough ended 2-2. Boro were the better side and deservedly led 2-1 until George Hirst and Jarrod Gillet combined to give Ipswich the softest of penalties for them to spawn and equalizer. Hirst clearly came on as a sub with strict instructions to throw himself on the floor at every opportunity and Gillet bought the slightest touch from a defender and Hirst chucking himself down. I make that three decisions in three games that Ipswich have had that every other team is questioning. If it all evens itself out over a season then they are due some shockers in the last three games.

19 games unbeaten in all competitions and 7 wins on the bounce in the Championship. What a time to be alive. Talking of being alive, Roy Hodgson is still alive and he brings his Bristol City side down to St Mary’s on Tuesday for our next game. Bring on 20 undefeated and if we manage another win, then the auto promotion picture might look different again.

Up the fucking Saints