Nov 28thA bunch of bottlers or not as good as we are made out to be?

Cast your mind back to the balmy, carefree days of October when Dave Jones was telling the world that, at that stage, we were ahead of the points target he and his staff had set the team for this season – I wonder, did the City’s think tank take into account our traditional November slump when setting this target? If they did, then it might well be that we are still on course to beat it because, let’s face it, four points from five matches isn’t that bad by our standards for this month.

I’ve admitted defeat in trying to fathom out why we are so crap in November and from now on am going to accept it as a matter of fact – while Dave Jones remains in charge of Cardiff City we will have a slump during the month of November and there’s nothing that can be done about it. Anyway, I wonder if, this time around anyway, the November thing has been a bit of a red herring (and I say that as someone who has been more guilty than most of referring to it during our run of poor results)? This month’s programme always looked a tough set of fixtures with four of our games being against sides with genuine promotion aspirations and our return of just one point from these fixtures cannot be put down solely to the month they happened to be played in.

Reaction to yesterday’s 2-1 defeat at Queens Park Rangers on the messageboards has tended to fall into one of two categories. The first of these sees our team as being the most talented in the Championship who consistently fail on the big occasions – in short we are a bunch of bottlers. Now, speaking as someone who will believe to his dying day that we bottled it completely at the end of the 08/09 season, I can see in a way why people might think that. After all, I can remember Brian McDermott the Reading manager saying on Sky’s Football League preview show at the end of October that anyone who finishes above Cardiff will go up automatically – the football world at large tends to see us as one of the two best sides in this league and so when we lose against rivals near the top of the table, it must be down to a lack of nerve mustn’t it?

Opposition players have been making a habit of breaking away from Seyi Olofinjana in recent matches.

The second viewpoint is the usual we are crap one that appears every time we lose (or even draw) a match. The table shows that we are, obviously, not crap but, if it comes down to a choice between this option and the talented bottlers one I think I am beginning to side more with those who say we are not as good as every one seems to want to tell us we are.

Until 7 November I believed Dave Jones when he said there was more to come from this side – although City had just been doing enough to get the job done in many of their matches, some of the football played against the likes of Doncaster, Bristol City, Leeds and Norwich backed this up (mind you, even in these games there were spells where the opposition were dominant). However, I must admit that the Swansea match saw me lose a lot of faith in this team – forget about who it was against, the tactical and footballing ineptitude shown by our manager and players that day came as a real shock to me as it got me wondering if there was an element of the Emperor’s New Clothes about us.

In saying that, speaking as someone who thought that defensively we were not a top six team last year, merely swapping Tom Heaton for David Marshall and Lee Naylor for Mark Kennedy was hardly going to lead to a dramatic improvement in that department – with Anthony Gerrard away at Hull this year and Adam Matthews not playing as well this time around, I would say there is a definite case to be made for saying that we are weaker at the back now than we were last season. To counteract this, we certainly have more depth in midfield and, although Peter Whittingham’s move to central midfield has meant we have lost a fair bit of fire power, the arrival of Craig Bellamy and Jay Bothroyd’s fine form makes us stronger up front.

However, just as was the case last season, having four or five of the best individuals in the league is not that much of an advantage if the “supporting cast” is of a level which is no better than average for the Championship. To illustrate what I mean, if you compare the back fives of the two teams yesterday player for player, I would pick the QPR one over ours in every case (especially since Kevin McNaughton has become more injury prone and inconsistent over the past eighteen months or so). To be fair to our defenders, I am comparing them with the Championship’s best there, but the point is that I feel there are a fair few other back fives around who are better than ours – Hudson, Blake, Gyepes and co are all decent to good performers who will have occasional outstanding games at this level, but I don’t see any of them as serious contenders for a Championship’s best eleven selection and, surely, a top two side would have at least one goalkeeper and/or defender in the running for a place?

The same applies, to a lesser extent, in other areas of the team and here I am afraid questions need to be asked about some of Dave Jones’ signings. I never saw Seyi Olofinjana as the midfield “enforcer” that he was built up to be – he enjoyed a very good start to his City career and was effective in stopping the opposition playing, but when two sets of supporters say the same thing about one of their ex players, you tend to think they might have a point and, at the moment anyway, Olofinjana is fading after a bright beginning just like Stoke and Hull fans thought he might.

As for Jason Koumas and Chris Riggott, we are fast reaching the stage where, for all the use they have been, we might as well have signed them in the January window. I would guess that the injury plagued Riggott is at least not costing us too much and, for me, Dave Jones’ better summer signings have been the cheap ones like Heaton and Danny Drinkwater, but I think we are going to need more than bargain basement signings in January if we are going to be successful in what is something of a promotion or bust season.

It has been claimed that there will be millions available for new players in January if we can maintain a top two spot. Therefore, we need our big players to start being as influential as they were back in October and then we can, hopefully, start adding some solid virtues like defensive reliability and consistency to our team – that’s boring I know, but we need top two (or, at least, top six) ability all over the pitch, not just at the top end of it.

A fine finish to win the match by Taarabt, but should he really have been allowed to get into that position so easily?

Anyway, I suppose I had better say a few things about the game that was played yesterday and the funny thing is that, despite all of the largely negative stuff above, I didn’t think we played too badly at all (certainly a lot better than the dross we served up against Swansea and Forest and during the second half at Scunthorpe anyway). Perhaps QPR were slightly more deserving of the win, but, overall, I thought a draw would have been a fair outcome and that is what we probably would have got if what was an obvious penalty had been given for that foul on Jay Bothroyd – as an aside, I see Neil Warnock was very complimentary towards the ref after the match, but I would have loved to have seen his reaction if Mr Friend had ruled in our favour (as Warnock accepted he could well have done) and then still turned down what looked a very good shout for a penalty for his side right at the death!

I believe that a lot of the after match criticism from supporters was as much to do with what has been happening in the previous three weeks as it was about us being so poor yesterday – if that game had been played in isolation, I daresay most of the after match discussion would have been about how we were robbed by the officials. If we keep on playing like that, we are good enough to keep a promotion challenge going because we do have more quality than recent results would indicate, but, I happen to believe that the quality is more thinly spread than it should be for a promotion side. I think money needs to be spent in January for that situation to change and, if he is given that financial backing to go with what he was provided with to bring in Bellamy, Olofinjana, Keogh, Koumas and Naylor (that doesn’t look as impressive a list now as it did back in September does it), then Dave Jones can have no excuse – anything short of promotion will not be good enough and I would not expect him to be here come June if we were preparing for the 2011/12 campaign as a Championship team.