Intro:

Swansea City coach Gary Monk looks ahead to Saturday's home game against Crystal Palace in the English Premier League.

Script:

SOUNDBITE (English) Gary Monk, Swansea City coach:  (on Saturday's game against Crystal Palace and whether their coach Neil Warnock's praise for his Swansea side is trying to gain a psychological edge)

"Yeah, possibly, but no... Neil (Warnock) is a good man, he's an experienced manager and you know, my focus is on us, not what anyone else says about us or anything like that. It's very nice to hear him say those words, but whether he's trying to deflect pressure onto us, it doesn't matter. We know what we have to do, we know what we're expecting from a good Crystal Palace team, who had a great result against Liverpool (3-1 at home on Sunday 23rd), so they will come here full of confidence and (it will) be a very tough game for us, they will come here with a game plan, try to stop us playing and you know, make it a sort of ugly kind of game. But we have to try to overcome that and hopefully our quality can show."

SOUNDBITE (English) Gary Monk, Swansea City coach:  (on being able to impose themselves against Palace and play their own game)

"Liverpool are in a difficult moment, so obviously Palace took advantage of that and performed very well, I thought they deserved the win. they performed very well, especially in the second half and (they are a) very strong team, very physical team and... (They) put themselves about, make a lot of tackles, so we're expecting them to be very physical with us, it's something that we have to stand up to and make sure that we try and do that and impose our game on them."

SOUNDBITE (English) Gary Monk, Swansea City coach:  (on the Premier League season so far and the next period being crucial to where Swansea will finish at the end of it)

"Whether the league balances out to its usual format, where, you know, the top six is usually a monopoly, for how many years now... but Southampton have a great chance, I'm sure they will be thinking about 'top four', with the start that they've had, but in terms of ourselves, we're not worried about what anyone else is doing or what anyone else is says about us, we're just trying to concentrate on ourselves and put performances on that can warrant good points and I've said now, we've got a period of about nine games where it will probably define our season. If we come out of that nine games, we'll see then if we're fighting for something higher up the league, or we're fighting for something lower down the league, so really the next nine games will define our season."