Newport County v Swansea City

Match Preview -
https://www.swanseacity.com/news/pre...v-swansea-city

A makeshift team for the Swans because of International call ups.
Rodon is the only experienced centre-half available. and he’s not 100% fit, Guehi and Cabango are away.
Byers is out injured, Grimes unsettled after Watford interest.
Other than that everything’s just fine!

The teams-

Newport County: Nick Townsend, Ryan Haynes, Joss Labadie (capt), Kyle Howkins, Matty Dolan, Josh Sheehan, Liam Shephard, Tristan Abrahams, Scott Twine, Lewis Collins, Mickey Demetriou.
Subs: Tom King, Ashley Baker, Robbie Willmott, Padraig Amond, Saikou Janneh, Ryan Taylor, Joe Woodiwiss.

Swansea City: Freddie Woodman, Kyle Naughton, Joe Rodon, Jay Fulton, Wayne Routledge, Matt Grimes (capt), Korey Smith, Morgan Gibbs-White, Jamal Lowe, Andre Ayew.
Subs: Steven Benda, Tivonge Rushesha, Cameron Evans, Daniel Williams, Yan Dhanda, Joel Asoro, Kristoffer Peterson.

Well done Newport, completely outplayed the Swans. We were weak and disjointed and no player came out of this with any credit.
Saw the goals and it was a defensive shambles, goalkeeper Woodman weak and statuesque, time for Benda to be given a chance.

Woodman at fault for both goals. Naughton and Woodman just watched on as Abraham’s fired in the first goal from point blank range. Second goal Woodman came out too early from his area to intercept Abraham’s breakaway run, from the resultant attempted tackle the ball bounced into Abraham’s path for him to slot home into an empty net.
Very poor, lethargic and disjointed performance. Coupled with the recent 7-1 friendly defeat to Southampton and we could be in a mini-crisis before the season starts. A lot of work to be done this week before the Preston match. The missing players returning from International duty will be a big boost to the squad.
One who won’t be returning though is Celina, who’s destined for Ligue 1 French side Dijon. A shame as he is one of only a few players in the squad with any flair in the team, but he didn’t fit into Cooper’s mundane style of football, and was out of favour all last season.

Steve Cooper:
“Congratulations to Newport for going through to the next round.
I think in simple terms, the non-negotiables of football, we were second best at today. When you do that, you always make it difficult for yourselves and that's what we did.
We left it too late to try and get ourselves back in the game.
No excuses. I know we're only a couple of weeks in, but we're not going to make any excuses, we were second best.
Every day we work on making sure there is good intensity and a good attitude to our work and there normally is with the players.
I think it is something we are going to have to talk to them about tomorrow to try and get a better understanding of why we weren’t winning duels, why Newport were running more than us, why we weren’t picking up enough second balls, why we weren’t making enough passes - all the things that are required to win a football match."

Still early days for the new signings to blend together, and the absent players to return. We badly need firepower up front, a box to box midfielder, and an experienced centre-back, this week there’ll be some developments hopefully.
On paper we should have won that game with far better players, but our attitude and commitment was all wrong and we got punished. We treated it like a training game whereas the Newport players were hungry for success and outfought us. Something for Mr Cooper to of sort out this week.

Iolo, with the Chairman leaving, our Academy 1 downgraded, Celina leaving, and now the cup defeat to a League 2 team without a fight, it’s been a bad week all round for the Swans.
We anxiously await some good news this week from our rudderless club.