Premier League: Laudrup demolishes great player/bad manager myth

Laudrup is getting the best out of his squad

Danish legend Michael Laudrup is working wonders with Swansea City and Ralph Ellis reckons they could get better. There's also an excellent bet to be had on their star striker...  

As a player, Michael Laudrup was as good as it gets. I know his name rarely gets a mention when you're doing the rounds of the "greatest ever" debate. That's normally Moore versus Pele versus Cruyff with a bit of George Best thrown in.

But Laudrup should never fail to get in the top ten. Four straight La Liga championships with Barcelona followed by a fifth with Real Madrid, titles in Italy and Holland, more than 100 Danish caps, were the top bullet points of a stellar career. Now there are signs that he could be just as major a figure in the management ranks.

Swansea's 2-0 win at Arsenal has not surprisingly brought down an avalanche of negative headlines about Arsene Wenger. Steve Bould is said to have let loose a dressing room tirade accusing Gunners players of letting the club down.

But after seeing in midweek the way the Swans dismantled West Brom as a warm up to their trip to The Emirates, I can't say I was all that surprised. The first half on Wednesday night was as good a 45 minute display as I've seen any side in the Premier League produce - one and two touch passing, fizzing the ball around, constantly creating danger.

Of course, Swansea were known for their passing game last year under Brendan Rodgers, and became everybody's second favourite team for the way a group of players with no obvious pedigree gave a lie to the theory that the only way to survive against the big boys of English football is to lump it and chase (Sam Allardcye, please note).

But while last year's Swans often passed for the sake of possession, the 2012-13 model under Laudrup has added a new dimension - they pass to hurt you, they pass forward more quickly. And in Michu they have a centre forward who is adapting very quickly to the intensity of the English game but who has an eye for goal (and incidentally he now shares the lead with ten alongside Luis Suarez and Robin Van Persie yet is an astonishing price of 29.028/1 for the golden boot.

But then the market seems to only just be waking up to Swansea's promise. In seventh place, and now only three points off of Chelsea who are third, their priced shaved to evens for a top ten finish this morning, although the 'lay' remained at 2.466/4.

The obvious reason to oppose that is the lack of big names in Laudrup's dressing room, but I was interested to read something he'd said about the brilliant Barcelona team of which he was an integral part: "Most of all we demonstrated that even without getting the ten best players in the world, you can have the best team."

That's also the ethos he's brought to the Gower coast. I asked him on Wednesday night what he'd done to revive the career of Wayne Routledge, who was considered a boy wonder at Crystal Palace then lost his way in a succession of moves that didn't work out. He didn't even know about Routledge's early career. "I don't look into the history of players, I like to judge only on what I see with my own eyes," he said.

It's an interesting approach when you are trying to make something of a side full of unfashionable names, and at the moment it appears to be working. Of course, it's a long season, and all that. But in a competition in which the biggest clubs rest their top names, Laudrup might just have a chance of landing a trophy in the Capital One Cup and 8.27/1 looks an enticing price.