Swansea boss Luke Williams thought his side were second best for the majority of the contest despite earning a 2-1 win at Derby.
The Swans stunned Pride Park into silence with less than two minutes on the clock when Zan Vipotnik sent a bullet past Jacob Widell Zetterstrom before Ronald slotted home his first of the season in the 14th minute.
Cyrus Christie brought Tom Barkhuizen down inside the box and Nathaniel Mendez-Laing dispatched the resulting penalty to cut the deficit in half and, despite piling on the pressure, Derby succumbed to a second home defeat of the season.
Williams told a press conference: “We started the game very well, we were good up until we scored the second goal then we lost the grip on the game and I thought Derby were the better team.
“The next thing for us we have to be able to maintain that level throughout the game and we weren’t able to do that to be quite honest today.
“They made it difficult, reacted very well after the second goal and didn’t go under, far from it.”
Swansea leapfrogged their opponents into the top half of the table with their sixth win of the season and took three points back to south Wales following two last-minute defeats by Burnley and Leeds heading into the match.
Williams added: “We’ve recently conceded late goals but they’re a very resilient group and we saw it out in the end.
“We’ve dominated games a lot but probably failed to score when we’ve been that dominant and tonight we managed to score the goals when we were dominant.
“We scored the goals at the right time today.”
Derby had been unbeaten in their last three matches coming into this one but Paul Warne put defeat down to a poor start.
He said: “We conceded two and didn’t get close enough, weren’t aggressive enough, not enough body contact and looked soft, that’s my fault.
“Maybe I didn’t message it properly. Sometimes it doesn’t come down to shape and tactics but I thought that was what the difference was.
“Credit Swansea for the win but after the 25 mins it looked like we would score. I really enjoyed it, that’s the truth. I had 70 minutes of a team giving everything, I don’t think we’ve had that many attempts in the Championship this season.
“It’s a rude awakening, last year we would’ve won that 4-2.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here