Swansea’s 62% possession is not enough as Cisse disturbs the cosy carousel

Swansea City 1-1 Kuban Krasnodar

The Liberty Stadium fell into almost silence late on Thursday evening as the former-Liverpool striker; Djibril Cisse stroked home a penalty carelessly given away by stand-in goalkeeper Gerhard Tremmel to draw a surprisingly fairly contested game. In what was meant to be a chance to seal qualification to the knock-out stages, Swansea City now head to Krasnodar about to experience what away days in Europe are all about.

Key Stats:

The main statistics for this game show that although Swansea dominated possession – they failed to kill this game off. The Swans had 17 shots on goal during the game, yet only scored one. Although, you may think Swansea dominated the whole game – they didn’t. Kuban had 17 shots themselves and will go away from this match wondering how they only scored once.

As you can also see, Swansea’s pass completion rate (87%) was far higher than Krasnodar’s (74%), this won’t surprise many people who follow the Premier League as everybody knows Michael Laudrup‘s men like to play the ball around. However, the Dane and his team will come under some criticism as a result of having 17 shots on goal and 62% possession but only scoring once. Maybe the route-one, direct method of creating chances may have worked better during this game?

Man of the Match:

Whenever a defender, especially a centre-back is given a Man of the Match award, it normally suggests that the defender had a lot to do and he did it very well. This is exactly why Chico was given our Man of the Match award. It speaks volumes about that none of Swansea’s strikers or attacking-midfielders were given it, but their centre-back.

Chico does deserve it, though. In terms of keeping Swansea in the game and making sure the Swans didn’t lose the match, Chico was excellent – he intercepted the ball more times than anybody else on his team and, as you can see below, those interceptions all came within yards from a shooting chance on goal, therefore Chico’s interceptions could be viewed as single-handedly saving his team from being beaten on the night.

As well as Chico’s interception count being high, the Spaniard also cleared the ball from his own penalty area six times and had a pass completion rate of 93% – a superb effort for a centre-back.

Performance Score:

Our Performance Score for this game shows once again that Swansea dominated and were the better team throughout – but not by much – the Welsh team were never miles ahead of Kuban in terms of shots on goal. The main point about the performance scores of both teams is the first-half scores. Swansea had totalled up 100 points at the break, yet couldn’t find the back of the net, while Kuban were on 26 points. This, once again shows exactly why Swansea fans won’t be happy about this result at all and how their team should have had this game put to bed before half-time having had nearly four times the performance score Kuban had.

Key Observations:

Swansea’s Action Areas graph tells you everything you need to know about this quite uninspiring Swans performance. The screenshot below of Swansea’s action area shows that although the Welsh side bossed the ball in the centre of midfield – they failed to score more the one goal – this is portrayed by Swansea only having slightly more than 2.50% of their time on the ball in the opposition’s area. Pretty dire considering the amount of chances Swansea created.

Lastly, one thing Swansea should be very pleased about – although not the best statistic when you draw against a team you should be cruising to victory against is how many successful through-balls Swansea played into and around the Kuban Krasnodar penalty box. Although, only one of these chances were put away, the fact the Swans created those chances shows that, on another day Swansea will win and have won games by four or five to nil, it just wasn’t to be against Kuban.