Caretaker boss Alan Sheehan paid tribute to his Swansea players after watching them turn the form book upside down and dismantle play-off chasers Blackburn 3-0 at Swansea.com Stadium.
Sheehan, placed in temporary charge of the club for the second time after head coach Luke Williams was sacked on Monday, could not have asked for a better response from his side.
The Swans had won only one and lost seven of their previous nine league games to slide down to 17th in the Sky Bet Championship table.
However, goals just before the break from Zan Vipotnik and Myles Peart-Harris – both restored to the starting line-up by Sheehan – gave Swansea a commanding and fully-deserved advantage at the break.
Peart-Harris then set up top scorer Liam Cullen for a third in the 62nd minute.
“I put it down to the players,” said Sheehan.
“It has been a really difficult week and it was about giving everyone the opportunity to have that disappointment – but then we have to channel it into some positive energy.
“We’ve asked a lot of questions of the lads this week and placed a lot of demands on them; we’ve all come under a lot of scrutiny.
“We had to come up with the right game plan – against a top six team – and the lads carried it out really well. All the credit goes to them.”
Swansea dominated throughout and crucially took their chances, but it may have been an entirely different outcome had home goalkeeper Lawrence Vigouroux not pulled off a fine one-handed save to keep out Andreas Weimann’s header inside two minutes.
Vigouroux denied Weimann again with the game still goalless and moments after that Swansea took a 39th-minute lead. Josh Tymon sent a free-kick into the Blackburn box and after they got themselves in a tangle trying to clear, before Slovenian Vipotnik poked home his first goal in 11 matches.
It got even better in first half stoppage time; after Vipotnik and Dion Sanderson had a brief tussle, the ball ran loose and Peart-Harris shrugged off Dominic Hyam, raced through and calmly rolled the ball beyond Pears.
Swansea continued to bombard Blackburn in the second half and Cullen put the result beyond doubt when he side-footed his 10th league goal of the season after Goncalo Franco had played Peart-Harris in down the left.
Rovers, who had won both of their previous games 2-0 under caretaker head coach David Lowe, were poor – and he admitted his side were firmly second best.
“It was a difficult afternoon for us,” he said.
“We had a couple of chances early on in the game which we didn’t take and, as we all know, if you concede first in the Championship, you’ve got an uphill task ahead of you.
“Unfortunately we didn’t produce the form which we have produced over the past two games and we’ve come up a little bit short.
“But it’s a learning curve for us; you’ve got to be up for every single game in this division and hopefully from now until the end of the season we’ll do that and manage to get into the play-offs.”
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