Harry Darling | Competition for places driving Swansea City form

Harry Darling believes the competition for places in the Swansea City squad has played a part in driving the club’s fine run of recent form.

The Swans have taken 16 points from the last 21 on offer, and their win over Sunderland at the Swansea.com Stadium was their third in a week and fourth in a row overall.

The 2-1 win – sealing a consecutive quartet of Championship triumphs for the first time since August 2019 – saw Darling get on the scoresheet and also plays his part in a robust defensive effort that helped see off a second-half fightback from the Black Cats.

Summer signing Darling has had to bide his time for a start due to the form of Ben Cabango, Nathan Wood and Kyle Naughton.

He took his opportunity, and acknowledged he knew the level of performance that would be required if he wants to nail down a regular spot in a side who are now the Championship’s form team.

“I knew I needed to put in a good performance because I’ve been out for a few weeks and everyone’s been brilliant in defence, so I knew I needed to put a good performance together and I’m just happy to be back in the team,” said the former MK Dons centre-half.

“I said to myself that I needed to get a few goals this season, so it was nice to get one on my return to the side.

“The boys that have been playing have been brilliant, and we’ve been winning at the end of the day.

“I’ve just kept my head down, looked to train well, and I needed to step in and do my job and hopefully everyone thinks I’ve done that.”

Wins over West Brom, Watford and Sunderland also saw the Swans show real resilience to win all three fixtures by the odd goal, putting the late disappointments of early in the season behind them.

And Darling feels that has been a big area of improvement in the recent sequence.

“As a team, we knew we needed to be better in those moments in the second half,” he said.

“We’re always constantly trying to get better, we’ll look through the video next week so we’ll learn from it, but we did show both sides of the game against Sunderland.

“From the start of the season, we conceded too many last-minute goals.

“That was one thing we really needed to iron out, but I think in the last few games we’ve done that and we’ve been able to hold onto these leads which we hadn’t at the start of the season.

“One of our targets was to get three wins in a row and we’ve done and we want to keep pushing on.”