Ominous lack of a cutting edge keeps Cardiff among the also rans.

11 Responses to Ominous lack of a cutting edge keeps Cardiff among the also rans.

1. Colin Phillips says:

   February 7, 2016 at 8:50 am

   Thanks for that report, Paul.

   You saw the game much as I did, total frustration yet again.

   I thought expectations were too high, if understandable, for a convincing win – we are Cardiff after all.

   Quite pleased with Lawrence’s debut, have grave doubts about Zohore (big and useless comes to mind) and very surprised to see that, on one forum I visit, that people voted for Ameobi as man of the match.

   One other thing that struck me from yesterday’s game that our two fastest players are the full-backs.
2. Colin Phillips says:

   February 7, 2016 at 9:39 am

   Oh!….and by the way Leicester City are forcing my words back down my throat – they show absolutely no sign of falling away!
3. Anthony O'Brien says:

   February 7, 2016 at 9:40 am

   IF CARLSBERG DID FOOTBALL (on a waterlogged pitch in driving rain, then they’d swing the ball into the goalmouth at every opportunity instead of shilly-shallying and they would have a right-footed player taking inswinging corners from the left).
   A day for balls in the air, crying out for a six-foot plus striker – but I agree that in the short time he had, Zahore didn’t provide much for optimism: I think he even ducked out of one high ball (a la Mason) when he could easily have challenged for it!.

   Lawrence showed some nice touches but he needs support. As Colin rightly points out, SPEED is still manifestly missing from the team – as it has been for much too long!
4. Richard Holt says:

   February 7, 2016 at 9:56 am

   Thanks for the excellent write-up Paul. A combination of my dodgy eye, the prospect of dreadful driving conditions and the doubts over whether the match would actually be played persuaded me not to travel up yesterday and it seems I didn’t miss too much. I have to say that the result didn’t surprise me one jot and was quite predictable in the kind of season we are having. I notice our next two games are against Charlton (bottom) and Brighton (3rd). I know which one I’m feeling more optimistic about !
5. Geoff Lewis says:

   February 7, 2016 at 2:55 pm

   Hi Paul,
   Excellent report of yesterday’s game. Despite the heavy rain, I thought I would make the round trip of 130 miles by car to watch this game. When I was approaching the outskirts of Cardiff, just after the Llantrisant junction, it was announced if there was a further heavy downpour, the game would be called off( On reflection this may have been a better decision)
   We had a number of good chances to bury MK Dons, but alas I suppose with the conditions it was not to be. I thought Lawrence improved his play in the second half and to me O’keefe was the best player for us, I enjoyed watching Johnny Williams a very clever player. Maynard must have thought he was playing for Cardiff, when he blasted his chance wide!
   Listening to the radio on the way home, usual comments “Slade out”, but at the end of the day it is up to those players on the pitch to deliver the goods.
   He does not read the game that well or make the right substitutions, we all agree on that one.
   I firmly believe that he needs one or even two of his assistants to watch the game from either the Ninian or Grandstand to see the game overall, rather than at ground level.
   I have watched Cardiff for many years in different parts of the ground, including Ninian Park, the Bob Bank, behind the goals, but to me , the best view if you can afford it, is to look down and see all of the play.
   I note that Bristol City beat Charlton 1-0 away from home_ Can we do the same thing next Saturday?
   Best Regards
   Geoff
6. RUSSELL= says:

   February 7, 2016 at 3:42 pm

   Like you I felt Lawrence In the first half was lightweight ,how he got the fans MOM vote baffled me must be a Welsh thing vote . The kindest fan vote would have been nyl pw?? for any of them .

   The conditions underfoot were slippery and a number of players ,suffered from slips,which is the only reason I can afford the performance .

   Looking at the highlight after the game in the infamous crowded ? Eddie May bar it did show we had enough chances in front of goal to have won easily.
7. MIKE HOPE says:

   February 8, 2016 at 12:16 am

   One of football’s clichés is ‘it’s about narrow margins’. If Saturday’s game had ended with a 4-1 win it would not have been an unfair reflection of the game but unfortunately the cutting edge was missing.
   We started very poorly yet somehow we had three great goal scoring opportunities just before half time.
   Slade must have been in legendary mode with his interval team talk because we started the second half playing our best football but with no end product it ultimately became another disappointing and frustrating afternoon.
   After a slow start I thought Lawrence had a very promising debut. He grew into the game both when playing up-front [we seemed to vary from 4-4-2 to 4-4-1-1 ] and when he replaced Ameobi wide right.
   As for our other debutant, Zohore , oh dear! He looked as if he had wandered onto the field by mistake and found a game of football going on around him! But as it was his first game in this country we must cut him some slack and give him the chance to adapt to Championship football.
   Incidentally,Paul, I can’t compete with your football reporting but I am not sure about your meteorological analysis.If you thought the heavy drizzle we had during the game was like the heavens opening you would have been into Yellow Pages looking for ark builders if you had been with me when I took my dog for a walk on Saturday morning!
8. Dai Woosnam says:

   February 8, 2016 at 2:46 am

   Some very interesting contributions from your fans Paul. And of course a solid piece from you…but that last is a “given”, I guess, and if I ever forget to say it, then trust me, it will be an oversight on my part…not a cooling-off of my appreciation of your work.
   Here are some observations…in no particular order of importance.
   First, Joe Mason.
   Do I detect that you are already thinking a mistake has been made here? Look, Paul…you may as well get used to Mason scoring a decent number of scrambled goals in the decade ahead. That’s what he does. He has no speed, cannot jump, and thus is no good with the outside of his head. And even the inside of his head needs working on: he is caught offside too often for my liking.
   But in an attacking side like Wolves at home, he will score scrambled efforts like his 3rd minute goal on home debut.
   Second point…the weather. When Grimbarians ask me what I miss of Wales, they expect me to say taxi ranks sign-posted “tacsi”* or the fact that South Walians seem to be unique in Britain as people not possessing watches (incredible that once you come into Wales over the Severn Bridge, you suddenly see all the motorway matrix boards telling you the time! What is that all about?).
   But in truth, I miss the rain.
   The last time I looked, of the 63 UK weather stations on the Met Office website, Cleethorpes just 3 miles from me, had thevsecond lowest rainfall in the country…and well under half that of Cardiff.
   To add to Mike’s amusing flight of fancy, there are no occasions in N.E. Lincs where I want to round up two of every animal species I can find….!!
   Third point…my eyes fell on this from you:
   ‘…
   referee Kevin Johnson, who I thought generally favoured MK Dons (he penalised City for fouls twice as often as he did our visitors)
   …’

   You may be right, Paul. But does that REALLY show that the ref favoured the MK Thieves…sorry…”non-Wimble-DONS” ?
   I ask because I reflect on a conversation I had in a bar here in Malta just this afternoon, where I had gone to see the Wales game from Dublin.
   I was talking to a social worker from Manchester who said that it was a crying shame that Britain had the biggest prison population of Western Europe. She said it was “twice that per capita of some of our nearest neighbours”. She added that many of those incarcerated, need not be there.
   I expressed a healthy scepticism re her comments, and suggested that maybe we have twice the imprisoned criminals, because, we are ..
   (Wait for it…)
   …
   …
   …twice as …
   WICKED.

   Kindest, as ever,
   Dai.
   *the fact that “taxi” along with “stop” are two words that are used the world over…irrespective of alphabet. Even in Russia with its Cyrillic, you will see “taxi” in its 4 letter glory, on top of the Ladas.
9. The other Bob Wilson says:

   February 8, 2016 at 9:34 am

   Colin, I too was surprised to see Ameobi being described as our beat player on Saturday – he wasn’t the worst, but, at a conservative estimate, about half of the team were better than him. Regarding Leicester, I’ve always thought Spurs might be the team to possibly overhaul them and that’s why I believed their recent win at White Hart Lane was such a huge result. Despite the recent outbreak of Leicester can win it pronunciations in the media, I’m still not convinced that those saying it actually mean it and so, in a weird way, the pressure is still off Leicester – they can lose at Arsenal next weekend and still be in the box seat.
   Richard. I’m confident that we will win one of our next two matches, but consecutive victories seem to be beyond us – I said to someone yesterday that a team which goes almost six months without recording back to back wins are not going to make the Play Offs, it seems to be a mental thing with this group of players.
   Geoff, I found the reluctance to bring Immers on surprising because. although I don’t normally like seeing the ball launched forward, the conditions on Saturday should have dictated that the ball should be kept off the floor more than normal. Zohore might not have looked too clever, but I’d still like to have seen him given an extra quarter of an hour say on top of the five minutes or so he was given – I’m also baffled by the continued selection of Gunnarsson and Dikgacoi as substitutes, have one of them on the bench by all means, but wouldn’t it be better to have, say, a winger there instead of one of them?
   Russell, I would have given the man of the match award to O’Keefe I think, Lawrence would have been in my top three or four, but he was anonymous in the first forty minutes.
   Mike, looked at in isolation, you can say we should have won all of the matches we drawn at home recently quite convincingly, but City haven’t done winning convincingly for ages (I make it nearly three years since we won a competitive match by a margin of three goals or more) and, when you keep on hearing that a side is unlucky, you start to wonder if there is more to it than that – for me, City are always a side that offers our opponents hope – be that through, for example, failing to convert chances (as on Saturday or against Forest) or a failure to hold on to leads.
   Dai, I’d gladly swap the weather they get in Cleethorpes for what we’ve been having in South Wales. I’m heartily sick of wading through the paddy field that was my lawn and slipping and sliding in the mud the mud as I make my way to my shed every morning to get the food for the birds, I’m also pissed off with working hard to keep the floors clean in the house and then seeing all of that work go to waste within minutes or hours when the dog comes in after going out the back for a pee. At the moment, I’m looking out on to my front lawn and dreading the job I’ll have when (or should that be if?) it is dry enough to mow it, because the grass has not stopped growing through this thoroughly miserable mild, wet winter – the only good thing I can say about it is that I saved a few quid I suppose by not needing to switch the radiators on for days on end in December and January.
   As for Joe Mason, a goal only counts for one no matter how it is scored – one of his tap ins or “scrambled efforts” would have made all of the difference on Saturday and I maintain that there is a knack/talent to being able to score such goals – certainly, no one else at City appears to have it, because, if he didn’t do it, we struggled to score such goals while he was here and I don’t see that situation changing now he’s gone.
10. Barry cole says:

    February 8, 2016 at 6:37 pm

    Another good one Paul, didn’t go to game as I had a feeling what would happen and it did.
    With tan flying in I have reason to believe he is at last realising that slade will not get passed the winning post now and his money is in jeopardy. He should have dispensed with his services at the end of last season, he had another chance at Christmas but it is now getting too late for any change to be effective.
    I haven’t been a fan of slade from day one not because he was picked by tan but his record showed he was out of his class with Cardiff and continually has proved that in how he has managed games.
    Sometimes I feel sorry for him in as much as he is working under duress but the opposite of that is he took the job and knew what was going to happen.
    So I hope that tan values his money a lot more than he values cause if he continues we will continue to stutter into mid table with a squad that should be in the top two of this league
11. The other Bob Wilson says:

    February 9, 2016 at 10:09 am

    I’ve never shared your high opinion of our squad Barry – top six possibly, but not top two. That said, I compare the Birmingham (especially now Gray has gone) and Ipswich squads to ours and think we should be above them both in the table. When I try to work out why this isn’t the case, I come back to the question as to whether those two clubs have better managers than ours – I think they have. McCarthy is a proven performer at this level and, if I’m surprised about anything regarding his time at Ipswich. it’s that it took him a little longer than I thought it would to get them challenging at the top end of the league. As for Rowett, Birmingham improved almost as soon as he took over and he’s proved that there was no beginner’s luck involved in that because they’re doing better again this season. Regarding us, I’ll be surprised if Vincent Tan’s trip to this country involves him dismissing our manager – if I had to guess, I’d say Russell Slade will still be our manager when our fixtures for this season end, but not when the new one starts.

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