Swansea City could be boosted by the return of full-back Josh Key for Saturday's clash with Blackburn Rovers. Key has missed the last five games after suffering a hamstring injury, but has now returned to full training ahead of the visit of Rovers, who have lost just one game in the last six Championship outings.
However, Moussa Yeo is still sidelined with a hamstring injury of his own and is unlikely to return before the next international break.
Matos confirms Key availability
"Keysey returned to training normally with the team so he's available for us to use, all the rest players who are injured are still injured," Matos said. "It's always good to have a player back especially with the quality and the character of Key. So really happy to have him."
"He gives us someone who can really attack with speed over that side in terms of crossing. He also played as a winger last season with us and he had quite the impact. So he's a player with a lot of qualities that we like, of course. So it's important to have him back in the squad and he's of course someone that we really like to have in terms of character."
Reaction after QPR defeat
Matos will be eager for a reaction from his side following their 5-0 mauling at Queens Park Rangers last weekend, with the Swans boss pleased with the reaction from his side on the training ground. "It was of course a quite demanding week as we will expect," he added. "But we had honest conversations between us and I think what I'm more pleased with was the reaction on the training pitch. The intensity, with togetherness, with the ambition. That was good to see, and of course what we now want is to react on Saturday."
Matos admits there will be lessons learned from what was his heaviest defeat as a head coach, but insists it cannot detract from what's still been an impressive start to the season for the Swans.
Learning from defeat
"You can always learn from any situation," he continued. "But when you lose, of course you can learn out of that because you have feedback of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong, or what was not good in that particular game. So that's what we try to understand. That's what we train but it's quite important that we have emotional stability as well to understand a clear idea of how we want to go."
"One game doesn't erase everything we did and doesn't take the conviction of what we want to be and how we want to play and I think that's the most important for all of us. Everything becomes bigger with the numbers," he added, referring to the scale of Saturday's defeat. "I think that never helps but I think I've had worse days as a manager already. Not because of results but because there's more than football in our lives and sometimes hard things come when you don't expect. So I would say result-wise was the hardest one I would say."
