By David Williams

Matt Grimes has told his Swansea City side they need a huge improvement at Millwall tonight if they are to recover ground in the race for the Championship play-offs.

The Swans visit The Den on the back of an extremely damaging 1-0 home defeat to bottom club Luton Town at the weekend.

That loss – coming a week after their emphatic 3-0 win at Middlesbrough a week before when the season re-started – has left them back in 10^th place and four points adrift of the play-off places.

The average tally needed to finish sixth in the table over recent years has been 73 points.

That suggests the Swans would require 17 points from their seven remaining matches, meaning at least five wins.

“The games come thick and fast so there’s no time to dwell but we know we were nowhere near good enough on Saturday,” said Swans captain and midfielder Grimes.

“We need to make amends because it was a poor performance and we’re much better than that. We need to do analyse what we could have done better and go again.

“We were way off it. We can’t expect to play like that and win a game of football. It was all our own making. We were nowhere near good enough.

 

Swansea City have spent the lockdown watching old Welsh League videos pic.twitter.com/76PnW9D8Wv

— Richard Taylor (@RichLido) June 27, 2020

“We need to back up good performances with more good performances and more points. We didn’t do that on Saturday, so we must bounce back.”

Millwall lost 3-2 at home to Derby County in their first fixture back and followed up with a 0-0 draw at Barnsley on Saturday.

The Lions are one point and one place behind the Swans and manager Gary Rowett said: “We found the break difficult – while I have to be as positive as I can be and make it sound like it’s not a massive issue for us – it’s been tough.

“We finished with a 3-0 win over Forest and we’ve struggled to get that back as quickly as we’d have liked.

“It’s a nine-game season and you can’t afford to not get momentum. We need to win on Tuesday. If we don’t it’s going to be very difficult for us to get to where we want to be.”