Guidolin congratulates Curtis after shock Swansea win

Scott Anderson
Alan Curtis: New role

Alan Curtis: New role

Francesco Guidolin called Alan Curtis from his hospital bed to congratulate him on Swansea’s shock 2-1 win over Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium.

Goals from Wayne Routledge and Ashley Williams secured a brilliant win for the Swans, who came from behind after Joel Campbell opened the scoring for the Gunners.

Arsenal hit the woodwork three times but Swansea held on to snatch a famous win that sees them go six points clear of the relegation zone.

Speaking after the match, Curtis revealed that Guidolin rang from his hospital bed to congratulate him on the vital win.

Curtis said: “I haven’t spoken to Francesco yet, but he left a message on my phone saying how pleased he was, that he was delighted, and to say hello to everybody.

“He has lung infection and he will stay in hospital for a couple of days I think.

“He could travel back to Swansea on Friday, we will see.

“He has been struggling for a while. He has turned up for training to be fair and we picked the team together.

“We didn’t make changes for the sake of it. We are towards the bottom of the table and, apart from maybe Ashley Williams and Lukasz Fabianski, there’s nobody who is guaranteed a place.

“There was an element of looking ahead to Norwich, as well as Bournemouth and Aston Villa after that, because they are three massive games for us.

“And in Leon Britton’s case, we didn’t want to give him the workload of three games in a week.”

After Curtis switched from a diamond in midfield to 4-2-3-1, Swansea took a foothold of the game and fought back to claim the win.

“Don’t tell (Guodolin) we did that,” Curtis joked.

“Arsenal kept coming and coming at us early on and we felt we had to change it to try to stem the flow.”

Swansea made six changes from the side that lost to Spurs at the weekend, and Curtis admitted that the players that came in “grabbed their opportunity”.

“Sometimes it comes off for you, and thankfully this was one of those games.

“Some of the players who have not played that much grabbed their opportunity tonight and they have given the manager a problem.

“We have given ourselves a little reminder that we can still play good football. We are still a good footballing team.

“I think playing against Arsenal suits us because they play football against us.”