It’s late at night the day before the Sheffield Wednesday game – I’m still working to finish this fanzine and Michael Duff is still manager of Swansea City Football Club.

The former is no surprise as it feels like I’ve been working on this first issue of the season forever…which is entirely my fault as I delayed publication twice.

The latter is slightly surprising given the ever building dislike of Duff amongst the Jack Army and the sheer lack of quality in the matches he’s overseen so far.

I don’t know if you feel the same but I feel like I’ve gone through a full season’s emotions already. I’ve lurched between feeling positive to despondent and back again as the story of our summer revolution has unfolded.

But the pendulum stopped swinging and has been stuck at ‘oh shit!’ since the Bristol City defeat a few weeks ago.

Since that time we’ve found ourselves stuck in the bottom three, we’ve lost to bitter rivals Cardiff and we’ve coughed up a late, late equaliser at Queens Park Rangers.

More worrying than the bad results has been the ever degrading quality of our football. Duff has seemingly torn out everything about the Russell Martin style without having anything to replace it with.

No style. No points. No hope.

Well that’s how it feels at the moment – maybe it will feel different if we get a result and/or a performance against the Owls.

Compounding the worries is the state of things off the field. I’m not quite sure what to make of new Chairman Andy Coleman; I would like to insert my deepest condolences to him and his family on record after the loss of his mother and I did like his recent statement which had a theme of ‘accountability’ running through it.

However, Jake Silverstein was just as personable and talked a good game too (talked a bit too much over Reddit mind you!), and he’s turned out to be just the same as our original American duo Kaplan & Levien – all mouth, no trousers…or ‘pants’ if you want to be American authentic.

Paul Watson appeared to be an exciting appointment as Sporting Director but many have based that on the transfer success and exploits over the last couple of years of his former club Luton, me included. But the jury is very much out on the raft of signings he’s overseen in his first transfer window whilst the blame for the so far disastrous appointment of Duff is being laid firmly at his door by a growing number of disgruntled fans.

All in all it’s a worrying time and we need every point we can get as quickly as possible, starting with three of them for a win over Wednesday tomorrow. Teams that get stranded in that bottom three early on almost certainly face a wretched season in a battle for survival – the Steve Cooper/Nottingham Forest fairytale is a rare thing indeed.

It’s disappointing that after just seven games of the season it’s looking like our only realistic aspiration is staying up – but that’s football for you. It’s something I can grudgingly accept and deal with having been a football fan in general and a Swans fan in particular for the best part of five decades.

But I wonder how acceptable it will be to new ‘money men’ Nigel Morris and Brett Cravatt? That could be entertaining in itself if it wasn’t for the fact the whole ownership shenanigans are played out behind a thick Delaware USA curtain, and us fans have nobody to peek behind that curtain for us since the current Trust Board opted to aid and abet rather than hold to account.

Ah man, now I’ve made myself angry again late at night – time for me to take an Alka Seltzer and put myself to bed to dream of passing triangles and three points tomorrow. 

And time to put this issue of A Touch Far Vetched to bed too – hope you’ll enjoy the read!