Swansea vs Stoke 22.04.2017/ England Premier
A promising start from Paul Clement at the helm for Swansea is turning into a bigger nightmare by the week and he has labelled this fixture as not only ‘must-win’ but the biggest game in years for the hosts.
He admits his players have not responded well to the pressure of a relegation battled with flat performances against West Ham and Watford so I wonder what his thinking is behind placing so much emphasis on this outing?
Both the above fixtures finished 1-0 so not a great deal more would have been needed to take something from them in all honesty.
The excellent Alfie Mawson’s horror mistake to gift Etienne Capoue a winner last week has been the last six weeks in a nutshell and probably adds credence to the old wives tale about being punished for every little mistake when you are at the bottom of the table.
Swansea have been priced up at around the 5/4 mark and that looks pretty skinny for a team in their predicament, but Stoke are the ideal type of opponent to try and restore some confidence.
It is just about job done for the Potters after a 3-1 success over Hull ended a barren spell of four defeats on the spin to leave them on a handy 39 points.
There are some very talented players under the leadership of Mark Hughes but they remain frustratingly hit and miss and well capable of luring punters in to erroneously supporting them on the back of a decent display.
They were making heavy weather of beating the Tigers but two inspired substitutions worked the oracle and I get the feeling Hughes himself sometimes does not know quite what he will get.
So I am going to take a punt on the home side to respond in a positive manner to Clement’s battle cry – Mawson will be fired-up to make amends while it is high time Gylfi Sigurdsson and Fernando Lorente stood up and were counted.
