FA Cup: How Swansea team bond and mud saw off West Ham

Swansea's unexpected win over the Premier League high-flyers saw big celebrations

It was one of the classic FA Cup third round upsets.

Swansea City's players, sitting in the fourth tier, had just been told by their manager that none of them had the right to play Premier League high-flyers West Ham United.

The Hammers had coming England stars like Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole, and Swansea-born John Hartson.

But team bonding, a muddy pitch and a spectacular volley by an injured player saw the Swans claim a big scalp.

The Swans knocked out the Hammers in that 1999 replay, after coming within a whisker of doing so in the first game.

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Remarkably, the winner came from Martin Thomas, who suffered a serious injury shortly into the match, but played on for another 80-plus minutes.

Over 70 places below their opponents, the Swans came within three minutes of seeing them off in the initial match at Upton Park.

The Swans conceded an 87th-minute equaliser from Julian Dicks, to take the tie back to Wales in a game which most watching said the Welsh side should deservedly have won.

Centre-back Matthew Bound recalled: "The week before we'd been thumped by Exeter City, and (manager) John Hollins said none of us deserved to play at West Ham.

Swansea manager John Hollins, with his assistant Alan Curtis, watch the 1999 clash

"But when we got out on the pitch at Upton Park, it was like a billiard table, and we realised we could play far more football than we'd been trying to do. That gave us so much confidence."

However it was a different story when West Ham visited the Vetch Field on 13 January.

Alan Curtis, the Swans' assistant manager that day, said: "Yeah, they might have Joe Cole, John Hartson, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand etc, but did you see their faces when they got off the coach and saw our dressing rooms and pitch?

"They'd lost it before they even got on the field.

"(West Ham manager) Harry Redknapp moaned to me that we'd had a kids' five-a-side tournament churning up the field before kick-off… I just smiled to him."

Bound believes that team cohesion was borne out of living together, when a lot of the players signed for the club at about the same time and boarded in the same hotel.

"We ate, trained, socialised with each other, and it made us into one unit on the field."

In front of a packed Vetch of nearly 11,000 in torrential rain, goalkeeper Roger Freestone was immediately in action, with three brilliant saves inside the first 15 minutes.

Club mascot Cyril the Swan was overcome with emotion as he embraced manager John Hollins

Yet the Swans keeper, jokingly nicknamed 33 Stone by some, shouldn't have even been playing that night.

"I'd broken a few of my knuckles in a previous match," he said.

"That might have been why I let in Dicks' equaliser in the first West Ham game… Boundy joked I'd chucked it in my own net just for the money from a replay back at the Vetch, but I was determined I wasn't going to show any injury to anyone before the game."

Once the Swans had weathered that initial storm, it took one piece of brilliance to unlock the Premier League side.

Scorer Martin Thomas remembers: "We cleared it out from the back, and it went to Jonathan Coates on the left.

"I had it squared into me and just started running. The defence seemed to part in front of me, and when I realised there was no-one to pass it to, I just wellied it, a bit like (Liverpool's Steven) Gerrard in the 2006 cup final; I must have been 20 or 30 yards out."

Thomas's 29th-minute volley came after he had injured his anterior cruciate ligament on 10 minutes.

But he played out the rest of the game as, despite a late onslaught from West Ham, a last-minute Freestone save from Neil Ruddock saw the Swans home.

Bound said: " It was an unusual team in professional football: so many of us have stayed in contact, and so many of us have chosen to stay in Wales after the end of our careers.

"That probably says all you need to know about how tight-knit that team was."

Freestone added: "When the Swans went down the tubes financially speaking, (in 2001), in any other club we'd have walked away and done our own thing, but we believed in each other so much that we decided we were going to keep it going, for the fans yes, but even more for our mates."

Curtis said: "Today's side has so much ability.

"If we could get the '99 belief and team spirit into them, then we'd not only avoid relegation, we could push for the play-offs."