da bet7： Swansea City’s approach has been a breath of fresh air to the Premier League and Brendan Rogers is finally chalking up the results their early season performances have deserved. The Swans boss is quick to point out that a lot of his success with the Welsh outfit is down to his predecessors who had already laid down an excellent platform for him to work from:
da dobrowin： “Certainly Swansea is a club with a tradition of having teams that play good football, and obviously they changed their structure when Roberto Martinez changed from a 4-4-2 to a 4-3-3, and from that moment the club brought in coaches and managers who understood that way of working and playing. Certainly that enabled me to fast-track and implement my own ideas into the group. They’d had a very good year in the Championship where they had finished eighth. Paulo Sousa took over and did an excellent job and they reached seventh position, and then I had the big challenge to take the club forward on a very limited budget. So it was really about trying to implement my own ideas – but the core of the group knew and believed in that way of playing. It was then a case of developing and improving that way rather than having to create it right from the beginning.”
Brendan Rogers was fortunate to work under, and with, Jose Mourinho and Andre Villas-Boas during his time at Chelsea and both men certainly had an influence over him:
“I think you obviously have your own ambition, and you need people to give you a chance, who think you have the capacity to work at that level. But obviously when you get the chance to work with such managers it gives you a chance to learn from the best and develop, and Jose was a fantastic influence for me. When you move into management, you’re working alone – you can’t look to imitate or be anyone else, and you have to carry your own ideas with you. But the more experience you have the better, and I have been very fortunate to be able to work with lots of very good managers, world-class managers. I have then hopefully been intelligent enough to take on board the good and the bad, and work it into my own identity.”
Rogers is certainly making a good fist of his first time in the Premier League and having had the good fortune of working under a manager like Mourinho, he certainly has had a good grounding of how to grind out results in this division. Whether the Swans take a similar pragmatic approach that Chelsea adopt as the season goes on remains to be seen, but for the time being it is clear that Swansea are going to have a go their own way first.
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