Swansea City and Crystal Palace prove that sacking your manager is a good thing

There's very little that's sensible to be done with a game of football that includes nine goals, two of which arrive in injury time and change the result. Such a game is an outlier of hilarious proportions. As such, perhaps Swansea City 5-4 Crystal Palace shouldn't be remembered as a football match. It should be admired as a work of art, enjoyed as a farce, and embraced as a sign that sometimes the the overbearing seriousness of professional sport and the Premier League can be undermined by two hours of nonsense that amounts to nothing so much as a cascade of shrug emojis.

However, complicated technological reasons prevent us simply publishing a cascade of shrug emojis, so let's have a dig around and see what we can find. Maybe we could start from basic principles. Given that plenty of football teams manage to get through a season without conceding four, let alone five, perhaps we could stick our collective neck out and tentatively conclude that neither of these two teams are particularly good at defending.

This makes sense for Swansea, of course. Good defending is as much about team organisation and communication as it is about simply having good defenders, and Bob Bradley, whose job it is to pick and organise those players, has had a mere six games in charge. The first job of any manager is to get spirits up, and Swansea's persistent application, which brought them goals in the 91st and 95th minutes, suggest that he's doing OK on that front.

For Palace, the lack of defensive coherence is significantly less comprehensible. Alan Pardew's been in the job for nearly two years now, and Palace have been actively bad at the back for almost a whole one of them. They were in an excellent fifth place in the league when 2015 ended; in 2016, they've played 32 league games and won just five. Even more remarkably, they've kept clean sheets in just two of those games.

There have been a few cup games in there too, of course: The run to last season's FA Cup final adds another five wins and three clean sheets, and they did beat Blackpool 2-0 earlier this season in the EFL Cup. And luckily for Pardew, football doesn't work on calendar years, and Palace's excellent form in the first half of last season meant that they stayed up despite their collapse. Not by much. But by enough.

Still, though, they look a state. Worse, they look a predictable state. Palace had reportedly spent the week before the Swansea game practicing their defending from set pieces, yet four of Swansea's five goals came from dead-ball situations. Perhaps we can forgive Gylfi Sigurdsson's direct free kick as something between a cute hit and a goalkeeping error, but the other three saw Leroy Fer, twice, and Fernando Llorente roaming the 6-yard box untroubled by defenders. Palace have conceded 13 set-piece goals already this season. Whatever's happening on the training ground isn't translating to the pitch, and with Palace in 17th, the papers are starting to speculate that Pardew may not be long for his job.

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to sacking a manager — wait as long as possible, or strike as soon as things start to turn sour — and neither is without attendant risks. Plenty of clubs have waited too long to get rid of a palpably failing manager, only acting once doom (or, worse, relegation) is inescapable. And plenty have left the frying pan by mutual consent, only to find themselves appointing the fire on a three-year deal. The right time to sack a manager is precisely at the moment when they are beyond rescuing the situation, but the situation is still perfectly rescuable, and the right replacement is available. Annoyingly, this moment is much easier to identify in hindsight.

Swansea are very much of the sack early, sack often school of thinking. The last manager to leave the Liberty Stadium of his own volition was Brendan Rodgers in 2012; since then, we've seen Michael Laudrup, winner of the League Cup, gone by the following February. Garry Monk, briefly touted as a future England manager, gone before his second Christmas. And Francesco Guidolin, who kept them in the Premier League last season, was thanked and sent on his way after just seven games of this campaign. This approach seems to work, too, for a baseline of not getting relegated.

Palace, however, are now getting on for a full calendar year of extremely mixed form and persistent vulnerability. Pardew has presumably been given time in part for the run to the cup final, and in part for his standing with the club as a former player, but if he were a Swansea manager, he might well have gone a while ago, and after taking the larger share of nine goals, Bob Bradley comes out of the weekend looking like an excellent advert for making a change. Even more worryingly for Pardew, there are two former England managers knocking around. And both Sam Allardyce and Roy Hodgson know how to organise a defensive line.