Swansea Boss Paul Clement Tells His Side to Treat Match Against Stoke Like a 'World Cup Final'

?Swansea boss Paul Clement has told his players that they need to treat their next match against Stoke as a ‘World Cup final’, as the Swans look in danger of failing in their survival bid to stay in the Premier League.

After such a good start Clement at the Liberty Stadium, beating Liverpool and looking like they were going to go on and cement their safety, things suddenly took a turn for the worse. The Welsh side have now lost five of their last six games and sit in 18th, two points off safety.

Speaking to the ?Mirror about how they should treat their game against Stoke, Clement said: “I’ve told the players that what we’re preparing for is a World Cup final – and the next game will be the same.

“But we’ve got to deal with this one against Stoke because if we don’t, then we might not have a World Cup final in the next game. We’ve got a lot of good energy around the players and they are upbeat about what can be achieved.

“We know that we’ve not done well enough, recently. But there’s a lot of football to be played and we can still do this.”

The former Real Madrid assistant insisted that his players didn’t get complacent when they were on their great run, saying: “My players didn’t get too comfortable being out of the relegation zone because to get to that position, we had to fight and scrap for everything.

“We knew that as quick as we could get into that position, we could go back the other way. We’ve spoken about that all the time. So it certainly hasn’t been through complacency or taking our eye off the ball with what we’ve needed to do.”

Talking about their upcoming match against Stoke, Clement said: “They were more direct under Tony Pulis, they had four centre-backs across the back four and massive strikers. I remember at Chelsea we would always be worried about the long throws and talk about it.

“We put a jumper in front of the long throws, we had Salomon Kalou and he got booked for doing it. Carlo Ancelotti was saying to us ‘how do we stop this?’. Ray Wilkins told him ‘just don’t kick it out for a throw-in, give away a corner instead’.

“But they are definitely a different side now. They have more footballers and match-winners. Marko Arnautovic and Xherdan Shaqiri are outstanding players.”