Tottenham will have to take game to Swansea

Fresh off of playing the underdog, Tottenham will now have to switch gears to take on a Swansea side looking to do the same.

Wednesday’s match against Borussia Dortmund saw Tottenham resort to heavily defensive, reactive football — a gambit that secured a memorable 3-1 win.

Swansea are in need of a similar win at Wembley after a mixed start to the season that has only seen the Welsh side come out on top against a hapless Crystal Palace in the second week of the season.

Paul Clement might therefore think that his Swans would be best off setting up in a way not dissimilar to how Spurs did on Wednesday.

Specifically, this would involve a compact defense augmented by a three man midfield designed to complicate matters for Spurs’ attacking midfielders and forwards.

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When possession is inevitably reclaimed, Swansea’s own chances will fall to the considerable long ball ability of centre-back Alfie Mawson and the invention of former Spurs playmaker Tom Carroll.

They will hope to find pacey strikers Jordan Ayew and Tammy Abraham with those balls forward, then through their combination engineer some chances on Hugo Lloris’ goals.

The similarities here between Swansea’s likely gameplan and Tottenham’s own on Wednesday are very broad however. A Swans midfield of Carroll, Renato Sanches and Sam Clucas isn’t quite the same as one composed of Christian Eriksen, Mousa Dembélé and Eric Dier, for instance.

Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Heung-min Son, meanwhile, combined for more 16 more goals than all of Swansea scored last season. Any combination of that trio could simply outshoot Ayew and Abraham, who have scored one goal each so far this term.

Nor will Swansea be able to collapse the field of play quite so well as Spurs did against Dortmund. Their centre-backs and full-backs simply don’t have the pace or positional sense to push up comfortably.

Next: Will Spurs' dominance over Swansea continue?

With Tottenham likely reverting to their typical pressing style, these gulfs in quality will likely prove fatal — just as five of the last six Premier League encounters have ended for Swansea.