Deconstructing the mythology of Millwall (a)

You’ve got your Stone Island on. You’ve watched Rise of the Foot Soldier Part II: Reign of the General. You’ve constructed confused ideas about the ontological beliefs of Karl Marx. You’re ready for Millwall away.

My one and only previous visit to the New Den had seen us pick up the epitome of a smash-and-grab win as Jefferson Montero-inspired 10-man Swans came from a goal down to win 2-1 in September 2018. That day was glorious not just due to the fact that it was an undeserved late victory on an early evening in late summer, but also because it was an away trip that played perfectly into the mythology of Millwall.

From getting off the overground at South Bermondsey and being shepherded down a chicken run to the away end to avoid any confrontations with the Headkickers or the Arseslappers or whatever the angry young men of South London have creatively named their firm, to being victims of incessant wanker signs from a gaggle of pre-teens in the stand opposite the dugouts, and then roundly abused by yet more aggressive individuals on the way back to the train thanks in no small part to the fact that the route of travel was demarcated for all to see; it was a lairy day out. The post-match train back to London Bridge even even featured a guy who could not have been any older than 18 offering out a carriage full of Swansea supporters and becoming increasingly aggravated despite receiving no provocation and no one engaging with his desperate expression of the lack of affection he received as a child.

Tuesday night was different though. We weren’t funnelled down the chicken run, instead forced to mix with potential members of the Tummyticklers on the approach to the ground. The fact that we safely made it to the away end without so much as a knowing-stare directed at us once again shows that an overbearing, authoritative approach to policing football crowds is being justified with little supporting evidence. This also made you realise that watching your team at Millwall is not really that different to watching your team anywhere else; the majority of people that support them are probably just normal people who don’t spend Christmas Day watching Green Street 1, 2 and 3 but like football in a similar way to which you do but were born in a different time and place.

This maybe makes it more worrying that they still so vociferously oppose a gesture in support of racial equality. I entirely understand players who feel taking a knee is no longer an impactful enough statement for them to support it, but it would be practically unthinkable for outward hostility to be shown during a minute of silence or applause, and there would surely be some form of public enquiry if any Remembrance Sunday commemorations were to be disrupted. Not entirely sure what can or should be done about it, but it seems bizarre that it has become such a ritualised aspect of the match day routine at Millwall at this point.

A trip to the New Den is often suggested as a considerable test of any Championship side that is starting to think it may be decent due to the associated physicality, brutality and atmosphere, but we are yet to lose there since being relegated from the Premier League in 2018. Even though two of those games were played behind-closed-doors, we have never really been bullied in a way that other sides of our ilk have, and our visit on Tuesday evening was not particularly different.

Millwall away did appear the perfect fixture for a crashing back down to earth. They are a physical, aggressive side seemingly regardless of who their manager is, and they still harbour hopes of disrupting the play-off picture despite being sandwiched in the league table by rivals with bigger budgets and more glamorous playing squads. They came to the Swansea.Com back in September in the early stages of the Russell Martin Experience and were quintessential Millwall; they slowed the game down, sat on the edge of their penalty area, and kept a side struggling to find attacking rhythm quiet in a goalless draw.

This squad’s lack of depth has been a considerable issue for much of the season. When an important member of the backline or one of the wing-backs, or, most tellingly in terms of our attacking output, Jamie Paterson, is missing we have tended to go from looking as though we can compete with near-on anyone in the Championship to a lower mid-table outfit. Therefore when Tuesday night’s team sheet was announced and Paterson was only among the substitutes and wonderful, reliable, destined for the Premier League in the summer for a fee well below our expectations Flynn Downes was absent entirely, it seemed like a good time to remember that the most important game that remained of our season had been won on Saturday.

Given football across much of Europe is now firmly in shit or get off the pot territory, Millwall had little option but to come out of the traps and try to disrupt our rhythm in this one. We showed some signs of either early nerves or a long-lasting hangover from the weekend as we twice gave away corners when trying to keep possession in our own half in the opening stages, but once a few set-pieces had been cleared, some cob webs have been blown off, and our passing triangles re-established, we practically picked up from where we had finished the demolition derby.

Millwall were more organised than Cardiff had been at the weekend, and went about interrupting our lengthy spells of possession with far greater purpose, but they still struggled to prevent their own supporters becoming frustrated with them even before the Swans took the lead.

Focusing so much on the opposition does feel slightly perverse given how dependent our way of playing is on what we are doing rather than how others can stop it. Even if it’s hard to know if it is a case of the system bringing the best out of individual players or individual players making the system operate more efficiently, there were arguably just as many impressive performances on Tuesday night as there had been on Saturday, if not more.

Jay Fulton provided an Academy Award-worthy impersonation of Downes alongside Matt Grimes in the middle of the park. The defensive trio of Joel Latibeaudiere, Kyle Naughton and Ben Cabango offered such a strong platform for those further forward to control the game that they may well be our starting backline going forward rather than just a solution for a handful of matches. Hannes Wolf had a greater influence on our forward play with less defensive responsibility on his dainty shoulders, and the understanding between Michael Obafemi and Joel Piroe is only continuing to blossom.

It was a delightful pass from Piroe in the direction of Obafemi that provided our first real chance at the New Den, only for the perma-smiling Irish striker to fail to connect when well positioned in an almost identical manor to which he had passed up an even earlier chance at Cardiff on Saturday.

This followed midway through the half by what was possibly one of our best passages of play of the season. Starting from a Ryan Manning throw-in in the left full-back position, the ball was moved from back to front and from side to side, gracing the feet of every outfield player aside from Cabango and Cyrus Christie at a decent speed and with clear intent to exploit gaps between Milwall’s defensive ranks. The move gained extra emphasis after an exchange between Piroe, Obafemi and Wolf that culminated in Wolf finding himself some space before lofting a gorgeous pass into the path of another direct and incisive forward run from Obafemi. He arguably connected with the ball too well, sending it high towards goal at a saveable height for Bartosz Bialkowski, but this was a clear indication that what we had been shown at Cardiff was not the final form of how good this style of football can be.

Despite failing to find the breakthrough, it was hard not to come away from the half feeling as though the passive bordering on sterile form of control we have had over quite a lot of games this season had perhaps evolved into something more dangerous. There seems to be a greater willingness to exploit space when it presents itself, and combined with the ball being moved faster from back to front, we are now surely much closer to being the team that Martin wants us to be. Quite how he has achieved this I am not sure. More time on the training pitch over the international break probably helped, but players who looked uncertain as to what was being asked of them now have a swagger about them that makes the team so much more watchable than it had been just a few short weeks ago.

We were ever so grateful that the half-time refreshment queue had been short and the fizzy lager had been something approaching drinkable, as less than a minute into the second half another series of passes saw the ball shifted from the left-hand side of our defensive third to Cyrus Christie on the right wing. His eventual cross fell into Piroe’s path via a stumble from Millwall’s Murray Wallace, and the Dutchman found the bottom corner with an instinctive, first-time strike, yet this goal should not be mistaken as one that was gifted to us.

The eventual effort on goal had come at the end of another incisive passage of possession, and even if it beat Bialkowski at his near post after the ‘keeper had managed to get a hand to the shot, it was yet another joyous example of Piroe’s expert finishing. He had already forced Bialkoswki into a decent save in the first half with a sharp turn and low strike, before creating space for himself and firing over the bar on the stroke of half-time. It says a lot that it was possibly more surprising that he did not find the bottom corner of the net with those two efforts than it was that he was successful with this attempt on his ‘weaker’ foot, as he continues to strike the football with an unerring level of accuracy and consistency that sets him apart from any forward I can remember watching in recent Swans history.

He has not been the main man as such since Obafemi consolidated his place in the team, but he is arguably contributing just as much, if not even more, in a slightly deeper role. The two aforementioned early passes in the direction of Obafemi in the last two games show his ability to be be productive around an opponent’s box, whilst he is also making life relatively easy for Cabango by dropping into the space in front of him to receive possession when we try to start attacks. His appreciation of space can even be seen in the goal that took him to 18 for the season and above Andre Ayew’s tally last year, as he initially makes a movement in behind Wallace before recognising Christie won’t be able to pick him out there and instead hangs back on the edge of the box. The fortune arrives in Christie’s mediocre cross being poorly dealt with by the Millwall defender, but Piroe has not established such an impressive scoring record courtesy of luck alone.

Christie passed up a chance to square to one of Obafemi, Piroe or Olivier Ntcham not long after, failing to do enough to draw Millwall’s last remaining towards him before playing the final ball, but Obafemi was having plenty of fun scurrying through the legs of the home side’s enormous centre-back Jake Cooper as he sought to continue his impressive recent form in front of goal.

Even when the home side ramped up the pressure in the final 10 minutes, they rarely managed to do more than flash dangerous balls into our box or work space in wide areas before failing to find a decisive final pass. There was one glaring opportunity that saw Benik Afobe and Daniel Ballard get in one another’s way to deny either or both a free header at the back post after a corner had only been half-cleared, although the anxiety associated with trying to hold a one-goal lead late in a game only makes the final whistle all the more satisfying.

These wins will probably end up amounting to not a great deal more than hopefully securing a top-half finishing position, but they showed we did not simply raise our performance levels for a game more important than any other at the weekend and we have seemingly taken our base level of performance up a notch. The next three fixtures are arguably favourable ones given they are against three teams that currently occupy places in the bottom four of the table, and the next two being at home off the back of back-to-back victories on the road does start to make you look at just how high this team could potentially finish.

Millwall were not as uninspired as Cardiff, and they still probably harbour hopes of gate-crashing the top six despite this defeat, yet the relative ease with which we enforced our way of playing on them and kept them at arms-length whilst also remaining threatening in attack makes you slightly mournful for what could have been possible for this team had things clicked into place slightly earlier or a few of the dominant draws been turned into slightly-fortunate wins.

We are now about level in terms of points with what was achieved in Graham Potter’s solitary season and in Steve Cooper’s first campaign at the helm at this stage. Even though both of those finishes were propped up by strong runs of form in the closing stages of the season, and we now feel geared towards doing similar this time around, comparing across campaigns or head coaches feels a touch redundant when you can instead appreciate this team within the context it is operating in (no parachute payments, no-one earning something bordering on £100k a week, and no future England internationals on loan from top 6 Premier League clubs) and simply enjoy it.

It has been so much fun watching the team play in this way and get positive results this week that I cannot wait for the next game to come around. Surely there is no bigger compliment you can pay to the football team you support.