Another heavy defeat for the Under 23s while Derby postponement row rumbles on,

A very short piece today concerning recent events at Cardiff City. I’m not going to waste much time on last night’s Development team game with Bolton at a freezing Cardiff City Stadium. Bolton are top of the Northern Section in the competition we take part in as representatives of the Southern Section, but they weren’t what you’d expect from league leaders – rather like the Preston side that came here and beat our first team, they didn’t look anything special at all, but they were still too good for our collection of trialists and young players who didn’t feature in Saturday’s 6-0 FAW Youth Cup Semi Final win over Airbus United (we will play Swansea or Connah’s Quay Nomads in the Final).

Ciaron Brown and Paul McKay both played, but, apart from that, I can only think of James Waite who might have got into what may be considered our strongest Under 23 side. Unfortunately, McKay (playing at right back to accommodate a trialist at centre half) was carried off on a stretcher in a lot of pain after sustaining an injury to his left leg. It was hard to see what happened, but there was a foul on one of our players a second or two after McKay sustained his injury and the match eventually restarted with a free kick for that challenge, rather than one for the incident involving the player we signed from Leeds at the turn of the year.

We only had two efforts on goal that I can remember and both forced good saves out of the Bolton keeper. Trialist Matthew Campbell (who started in lively fashion, but faded in the second half) got in a shot from the edge of the penalty area which the keeper pushed out and a great defensive block ensured that our trialist number nine was robbed of what at first appeared to be a simple, tap in, goal. Besides that, Waite had a shot from twenty yards tipped over in the opening minutes of the second half, but that was it as far as City were concerned as an attacking force.

Bolton led halfway through the first half through Connor Hall and then stretched clear in the final five minutes through goals by Ryan Moore and Hall again – 3-0 may have flattered the visitors, but not by that much.

Meanwhile, the row about the postponement of Sunday’s match at Derby less than four hours before kick off continues. While in sympathy with all of those City fans who were already in Derby or were on their way up after starting their journey’s from snowy South Wales in the early hours of Sunday morning, I must admit that I thought the war of words which followed the decision to postpone was of a “tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping paper” type which would soon be forgotten. However, developments throughout Monday suggest I may be proved wrong – rather than going into detail myself, I’ll let this good story from Wales Online outline the current position.