The comparison between Dunn and Allen is particularly interesting. I remember Dunn when he was about Allen’s age, very confident, bordering on the arrogant and a player who in his first spell at Blackburn scored 30 Premier League goals in just over 130 appearances to win him an England cap and a big money move to Birmingham City. At 32, he’s now at the opposite end of his career to Allen but you would still think as a seasoned “been there and done it” professional, Dunn might have known how to control a youngster like Allen yesterday. Sadly for Blackburn fans, that wasn’t the case for a single moment. Whilst he did manufacture Blackburn’s only real chance with an excellent curling shot that smacked into Michel Vorm’s left hand upright and also had two good headers from corners, apart from an ongoing verbal joust with Ashley Williams, Dunn contributed very little to Blackburn’s cause. He attempted just 32 passes compared to Allen’s 83 and completed just 19 of them for a passing accuracy of just 59%. If I tell you that the lowest pass accuracy for any Swansea player yesterday who completed the full 90 minutes was Ashley Williams’ 83%, then it puts Dunn’s inaccuracy into further context. Allen in the meantime completed 78 of his 83 passes for a 94% success rate. It doesn’t get much better than that. Unless you are Leon Britton of course who completed 100% of his passes yesterday.
In highlighting Dunn’s poor pass completion, it’s actually wrong to use Ashley Williams’ 83% passing accuracy as some sort of negative figure. If you take away Yakubu’s five successful passes out of six (83%), the highest accuracy by any Blackburn player yesterday was Pedersen’s 81%, two percent less than Williams’ 83%. When you consider that Williams’ 83% is made up of 91 successful passes out of 109, and Pedersen’s 81% only saw him attempting 26 passes, over three times less the number than Williams attempted, then it again shows that, as they had done in the previous fixture, Swansea City completely passed Blackburn off the park.
Watching the game yesterday, I couldn’t help but reflect back to the four recent defeats suffered by Swansea. Of the four, you could only really say Swansea played badly in one, QPR. Of the others, a combination of not taking advantage of excellent starts with an early goal, or conceding a goal against the run of play, meant that Swansea subsequently found it very hard to break down teams who then chose to concede Swansea possession but not allow them any opportunities to penetrate. The difference yesterday was that Swansea didn’t allow Blackburn any significant chances when the game was nil-nil, and whilst they didn’t score an early goal that their attacking endeavour deserved, the fact that Swansea scored their second goal just six minutes after the first meant that Blackburn had neither the fight or the quality to do anything about it as the match progressed, and ultimately ceased to be a contest of any real note.
In fact, one passage of play, early in the second half summed up Blackburn’s performance yesterday for me. It was a move that ended up in Angel Rangel bursting into the box for a shot he put over the bar, in a move that contained over 20 odd passes, and was akin to the moves put together in Swansea’s best performance this season, away at Fulham. As Swansea were stroking the ball around, constructing a move that would result in Rangel’s chance, not a single attempt was made by any Blackburn player to tackle or get a toe in to break up the move. When I remember Scott Parker at Tottenham for example, busting a gut to break down every passing sequence Swansea attempted, for a team supposedly desperate to avoid relegation, I couldn’t understand why not one Blackburn player attempted to emulate Parker’s industry and try to break up the move. Either Blackburn’s players have already resigned themselves to the drop or maybe it was a subconscious compliment to Swansea’s passing style and ability, that they simply felt it was pointless as they were never going to get the ball. Neither reason will give any comfort to the travelling Blackburn fans as they face four games to define their future in this division.
One thing is now certain following yesterday’s game however, Swansea City do have a future in this division, as the celebratory huddle of the players at the final whistle demonstrated, and despite Brendan Rodgers stating clearly after the game that he is not beginning to celebrate until his team’s survival is mathematically certain, the players now know that they have secured themselves safety, in some style, in the best league in world football. And they did it comprehensively yesterday, against the team who had inflicted one of their most undeserved defeats in a long season.
I don’t think revenge comes any sweeter than that.