Well, it was fun while it lasted, but Cardiff City’s improbable run all the way through to the Second Round of the League Cup came to an end tonight with a 2-0 home defeat by Premier League side Brighton.
I make no apologies for the somewhat hyperbolic and unjustified language in my first paragraph, my thinking was that when you have a record in the cup competitions like we do since we reached the 2012 Final of this tournament, anything that isn’t a First Round exit constitutes a cup adventure!
The truth of the matter is that made City eight changes from the team which beat Millwall on Saturday with only the three central defenders remaining in the starting line up, but one of those only lasted thirty five minutes before he was replaced by a debutant who thus joined two others who were making their first appearances in the senior side, so the defeat was, up to a point, understandable..
To put some names to all of that, captain Sean Morrison went off after being unable to shake off an injury he’d suffered about ten minutes earlier – the Radio Wales commentators sounded pretty hopeful that Morrison’s withdrawal was a precautionary measure and that he will be okay for the Severnside Derby on Saturday. Him going off gave a chance to Ollie Denham, the teenage ex Manchester United defender who joined us at the start of last season.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know the name of the former Welsh international who was the co commentator, but she was pretty impressed by Denham, as she was with one of the others making a first start, Sam Bowen, who she rated as our best player when she spoke about him about an hour into the game.
Bowen played in his natural position in central midfield, maybe it would have been better though if he had been chosen in the right wing back role he occupied in a couple of our pre season matches. I say that, because the other debutant, Tavio D’Almeida, occupied that position despite him never having played there, as far as I can remember, during what must now be two years with City.
D’Almeida‘s usual position is deep lying central midfield, but, having been out injured for much of last season, he returned to play as one of a back three for our Development team in much the same sort of experiment that saw Marlon Pack play in defence towards the end of last season. Like Pack, D’Almeida would improve the passing out from the back of the City team if he was used in a back three, but the big question is would his defending be up to the job?
That’s why I thought using this game to see how D’Almeida fared at the back seemed a good way to go or, failing that, he could have slotted in there when Morrison went off. Instead, he was asked to make his first team debut in an unfamiliar position and, although he grew into the role as the match went on apparently, he was singled out for criticism for his role in the early goal which ensured the visitors enjoyed a dominant first half in which they were seemingly worth more than a single goal lead.
Having now seen that goal, I think there was, just as with criticism of Joel Bagan following Peterborough’s second one last week, an element of blame the youngster going on there when far more responsibility lay with more experienced players. At Peterborough, Perry Ng was at fault first and foremost for being beaten so easily as last man, while last night, the three experienced centrebacks left a huge gap through the middle while also pushing up too far, thereby allowing Polish international Jakub Moder to seize on to a through ball and score easily.
The goal illustrated that while Mick McCarthy has made three at the back work a lot more effectively than the two Neil’s ever did and Curtis Nelson’s relative speed and good defensive instincts have helped us improve at the back, talk about us having a good defence, which I hear so often, should be qualified to acknowledge that we’re strong when dealing with an aerial assault, but teams utilising more subtle stuff like pace and movement, which you find more of in the Premier League, often make us look a lot less secure.
City fared better in the second half, hitting the crossbar through James Collins and forcing visiting captain Jason Steele into some good saves, but, just as in the first period, they conceded a soft goal stemming from them handing over possession (this time Will Vaulks was responsible) to Brighton ten minutes into the half and there was no way back for us from there.
Manager Mick McCarthy was honest in his post match assessment saying City had been “terrific” in the second half, but they had been beaten by a better team. Such a statement would be likely to be heard you would have thought if your team, showing changes galore, had lost to a side from a division above you, but then you discover that Brighton made eleven changes themselves from the team which beat Watford on the weekend.
The Brighton side was a mixture home produced youngsters and players brought in from abroad and it was when the commentator started to say how much these players had cost that I started to get a bit agitated.
There were a few that cost in the region of £5 million, but it was the revelation that Enoch Mwepu had cost Brighton £20 million this summer that couldn’t help but make me start making an unflattering comparison between them and us.
My mind went back to what I’m pretty sure was the last time we played Brighton at home in a night match. It was in February 2015 and it was a strong contender for the worst game ever played at our new ground as both sides had a single effort on target in a miserable 0-0 stalemate.
After that match, Chris Hughton, the Brighton manager, spoke of his satisfaction at having gained an away point in their battle to avoid the drop into the third tier of the domestic structure and it’s instructive to trace Brighton’s progress since then.
Hughton kept them up, got them promoted two years later and he kept them in the Premier League in the next two seasons, yet he was still sacked at end of the 18/19 campaign because the Board at the club wanted to move away from the cautious approach adopted by their successful manager and go for a more progressive style under Graham Potter.
It was a risky move, but it is a gamble that has definitely succeeded because Brighton now have a younger, much more entertaining and successful side that has kept their place in the top tier pretty comfortably and their recruitment is both shrewd and enterprising. They have also been able to bring the occasional player from their Academy through to the first team including Ben White who was transferred to Arsenal this summer at a price that more than pays for the club’s summer recruitment.
I’m not telling the whole story there though because in Hughton’s last season they came close to being relegated. Brighton we’re the one team I always thought we had a chance of overhauling to escape relegation in 18/19. Of course, their supporters will tell me to look at the league table for that season and say to me we were better than you, but I maintain that from November onwards, we were the better side – we did the double over them with a pretty fortunate 2-1 home win and a comfortable 2-0 victory at the Amex after which I was as confident as I ever got that we could send them down at our expense.
The point is though City and Brighton were very closely matched sides a little over two years ago and then Brighton made the most of their escape by making bold and progressive changes. In 2015 we were above Brighton in the table when we played out that awful 0-0 draw and four years later there was very little between the teams.
I just hope that, after watching the latest meeting between the two clubs, City Board members compare their short termism, which never sees them look beyond the end of any season, their cautious managerial appointments and their hit and mostly miss recruitment with the club that beat us pretty comfortably tonight.
Cardiff and Brighton are clubs that strike me as being about the same size and having around the same amount of potential, while I’d say we have slightly the more illustrious history – we could be in the position they are in now with different, more clued in attitudes at the top of our club.
It’s the time of year again when I ask readers of Mauve and Yellow Army to make a contribution towards its running costs. Before I go into detail about this, I should, once again, offer my sincere thanks to all of you who have helped ensure the future of the blog over the past three years through a mixture of monthly payments via Patreon, monthly Standing Orders into my bank account and once a year payments via bank transfer, PayPal, cheque and cash.
The first time I made this request for assistance, it was prompted by a need for funds to pay for three yearly web hosting costs which, frankly, I was in no position to meet following my move of house a few months earlier. However, I’m pleased to say that, this time around, the web hosting bill was settled back in June with none of the problems there were back in 2018.
Therefore, any monies received this year will go towards other running costs and, although it’s too early yet to make any formal commitments despite so many of the pandemic restrictions in Wales being lifted recently, I am minded to do another review of a season from the past book to follow on from “Real Madrid and all that” which looked back on the 1970/71 campaign. At the moment 1975/76, the first promotion season I experienced, looks to be favourite for the book treatment, which would mean a lot more trips back and forth to Cardiff than my finances have become used to over the past year and a half – hopefully, the majority of them will not have to be made via Radyr Cheyne!
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Yes, nice article (I followed a link from a Brighton site). Yes, we know that we’ve been SO lucky with our chairman; firstly for his initial financial backing when we didn’t have a pot to p!ss in, and then secondly with his appointments. There’s so much more to a modern football club than the manager and the first XI and we’ve got an amazing team off the pitch, which in turn has meant we’ve got the best side in our history ON the pitch. And yes your analysis that both clubs have similar potential (and your history is more illustrious) is spot on, so there is no reason why you can’t emulate us.
One point: in 2018/19 when you got relegated, yes, ok the table says over the course of the whole season we were ‘better’, but for the last six months I think every Brighton fan, far from saying “We were better!” would admit that Cardiff City were better than us – indeed most of us would argue that the Cardiff City Ladies Under-11’s were probably better than us. We were truly shocking and if the season had gone on for another week you would have overhauled us. That’s why Hughton was sacked, it just went SO badly pear-shaped it was incredible.
Good luck anyway!
That you Conan and welcome to Mauve and Yellow Army. It’s always nice to hear from supporters of opposing teams and I’ve noticed before that Brighton are one of the teams who I can quite often rely on getting a friendly and constructive reply from. If you have the time to look randomly back through my posts over the past eleven years (where do they go!), you’ll see that I couldn’t agree more with your “There’s so much more to a modern football club than the manager and the first XI” comment. Hopefully, the penny has finally dropped regarding youth development at Cardiff following almost a decade under Vincent Tan when players who come through the system at the club were ignored as we preferred to spend fortunes on players who gave us very little back despite being paid sums which meant they were almost impossible to move on.
As for 18/19, as I mentioned, I think we were quite lucky to beat you at our place considering we were playing against ten men for two thirds of the match and needed a very late goal, which wouldn’t have been allowed under VAR, to win. However, I couldn’t get over how comfortably we beat you at your place and, although I remember you regrouped to some extent after that with some good, unexpected draws away from home, a defensive selection and mind boggling substitutions from Neil Warnock in a very important game at already relegated Fulham cost us dearly.
You acted decisively in making a change despite surviving, whereas, in typical “plucky llttle Cardiff style”, we seemed to pat ourselves on the back on doing better than we did in our only previous season in the Premier League, kept our manager on and gave him tens of millions to spend on turning us into a team which former City player Nathan Blake calls “Warnockball on steroids” – an awful lot of fans could see what was coming a mile off, but we’ve gone even further down the “Warnockball” road in many ways since the man himself left.
I’d return your wishes of good luck, but I don’t think you’ll need it.