Bob Bradley insists Swansea City will have no advantage over Manchester United just because Jose Mourinho will be sitting in the stands on Sunday.
The United manager will be serving a one-match touchline ban hot on the heels of his club’s Europa League defeat to Fenerbahce in midweek.
But Swans boss Bradley says it will need more than an absent adversary for him to gain his first victory since taking charge.
“It makes no difference for me,” says Bradley. “For me the focus is on our team. I have met Jose along the way.
“I have had a couple of good conversations with him and I hope to catch up with him. But my focus is on my team, not his touchline ban.”
Bradley concedes that “every game is critical” for his struggling side as they look to climb away from Premier League relegation danger.
The Swans have taken only two points from a possible 27 since their opening-day victory at Burnley.
And Bradley believes his team must be sharper than Mourinho’s United if they are to bank a first league win in almost three months.
“What I see on the surface is that the group does a good job with everything,” said the Swans manager.
“They understand going into a game what the opponent wants to do and some of our ideas on how to handle that.
“But in a match, situations develop quickly, and you need the ability to recognise those situations, to smell danger and react quickly.
“For me, that’s the area where I think we are missing the most. That’s what I mean when I talk about players lacking confidence.
“In a game you can appear for long stretches to be doing a solid enough job, but you cannot have four, five or six plays where the ball pops loose, the opponent does something a bit different from what you expect and they make something out of it.
“We don’t deal with those situations well enough. I have seen examples of that before I came in and I still see them.
“People have made an effort to get back into the game, but in terms of asserting ourselves at the right moment, we have to improve.
“We can’t get caught in these situations the way we have been doing, because you concede goals.”
Despite the difficult run, Bradley rejects the suggestion that his players are going into games with any fear.
But he says that for all the preparation work they do on the training ground, the Swans must be ready for whatever comes their way once a game kicks off.
“We show videos and work on tactical details, but that is just establishing starting points,” Bradley added.
“Then the game starts. I hope we have done a good enough job with the things we have worked on, but then situations happen which you don’t always put in the script.
“When the ball pops loose, somebody senses it first and not only gets there, but already knows what the next play is going to be.
“When that happens, you see how the other team responds. I don’t think we are at a consistently high level in those situations.
“I have heard a lot of things since the Stoke game. Joe Allen had a very good game, but somebody said he had too much space.
“Actually I don’t think that’s true. I think we had a pretty good understanding of where he would move and what he would try to do.
“But at the same time, in the course of the game there were four or five plays where he was quicker to see what was going on than we were.
“Look at the goal they scored from the corner. Joe Allen reacts faster than any of our players to where Neil Taylor’s header was falling.
“We had four or five guys who were too slow to react and they scored a goal.
“On the day, Stoke won those battles, and these are the things which decide matches.”
