In my reaction piece for the Norwich game, I said that Aaron Ramsey’s comments to the media had made him being appointed as our new permanent manager less likely than it may have looked when he was first put in temporary charge of the team.
However, I wrote that before I’d heard Ramsey’s post game press conference in which he tended to adopt more of a wait and see attitude. Therefore, the notion of him getting the job now seems slightly more likely than I thought it was three or four days ago.
I hope and expect that we won’t see Ramsey appointed Player Manager as the role has almost become obsolete these days. I think you’d have to be very proficient in both of those parts of the game to make a success of the manager’s job while still making a playing contribution which made you part of your team’s strongest starting eleven.
Maybe I’m being unfair here, but what tends to come over when the subject of keeping on playing is discussed with Ramsey is that, first and foremost, he wants to be part of any Welsh participation in the 2026 World Cup. Of course, City would benefit if a fully fit Ramsey was playing well enough to get himself in the Welsh squad through next season, but he’ll be 35 next Boxing Day and there’s been nothing in the past two seasons to indicate that he will be able to do that as injuries will limit any contribution he makes as a player.
If Ramsey were to get the job, I believe it would signal an end to his playing career, so, making a few assumptions, would I want him to be the next manager of Cardiff City?
To hear Ramsey talking after the three games he took charge of, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d overseen a big improvement in the team. I don’t blame him for saying that and, in certain facets of the game, I’d say things were better. I thought our attitude was better in the games where we still had a chance of avoiding the drop and you could make a pretty convincing case for why we should have beaten Oxford and could have beaten West Brom – for me, the performance in those two matches was better than what we’d become used to under Omer Riza.
However, the fact is that while all around us were getting the wins needed to give them the chance to preserve their Championship status, we kept on failing to do so -Ramsey got us two points from a possible nine when we needed five more than that.
Those advocating Ramsey for manager would ask, not unreasonably, whether three games at very short notice with someone else’s squad should be enough to rule their man out of contention? I would add that, more than someone like a Richie Wellens or a Karl Robinson (two names linked with the job already), Ramsey would have the “clout’ to demand changes from Vincent Tan in the way the club is run and how it goes about its training and recruitment programmes.
Clearly, getting the managerial appointment right is very important. For my part, I thought appointing Ramsey could be an inspired choice or a complete flop before he had his three games in charge and my opinion hasn’t changed much after that trio of games have been played. Notwithstanding my earlier comment about him, Wellens appeals to me, Robinson doesn’t and as for Nathan Jones, I can’t help thinking that, if we ever were going to appoint him under Vincent Tan’s ownership, we would have done so by now.
Although three months seems a long time before competitive football starts again, let’s not forget that line about teams in the Play Offs being at a disadvantage because they’re behind in their planning compared to others. Well, City, for a third straight year, have put themselves at that same disadvantage while having none of the hope and possible joy that a Play Off place entails. More than any other candidate, Ramsey could be a quick appointment and, if he was, we would then, hopefully, not have to go through the rigmarole of this “review” of club procedure which, it seems, will be carried out by the same people who have made such a mess of running the club for the past five years (in fact, you could make that fifteen years).
So, while the choice of manager is undoubtedly significant, it still comes second to me to getting rid of the self inflicted disadvantages the ownership puts on the club when it comes to competing on an equal footing with the teams it faces every week.
It’s truly baffling why someone with Vincent Tan’s record in business does not seem to recognise and act upon the fact (and it is a fact, not an opinion) that the football part of his business “empire” is failing miserably in both Wales and Belgium. If his McDonald’s franchises in Malaysia was returning results like Cardiff City and Kortrijk have been doing year in, year out, he would have taken steps to address the situation well before now.
Tan knows his ownership of City has been, to put it mildly, a failure, yet he keeps on behaving as if he knows better than the all of the specialists in the footballing field who have been telling him he’s been getting it wrong for years.
Will the shame of a double relegation be enough to persuade Vimcent Tan as to the error of his ways? Is he in a position to listen to someone like a Ramsey or some other potential City manager when they tell him he has to change things to stop City’s downward drift – I’m not convinced he’ll change, but we have to hope that he will and there was that admission he was wrong with the rebrand ten years ago to cling to as well.
If Tan is for changing, what will that entail? Well, there’s been plenty of talk of things like a full time CEO working at the stadium every day, a Director of Football to oversee the recruitment side of things and more specialised coaching, but I’m no expert on such things and would be happy to leave it to people (not the trio currently in charge!) far more versed in what makes a successful football club these days to oversee the changes.
What I would say though is that I’m clear in my mind about the sort of things i don’t want to see any more of – here’s a few of them.
MANAGERIAL APPOINTMENTS
No more done on the cheap appointments from within. No more leaving a caretaker boss in charge for three months while results get worse and worse and then appoint him until the end of the season (something you could have done ten weeks earlier). No more of the arrogance which sees recommendations from former managers ignored because you consider their suggestions too “boring”. Let any manager manage without interference from the owner.
PLAYER RECRUITMENT
An end to the “transfer committee” which has clearly failed. An end to Roco Simic type transfers. After a season as a Cardiff City player, is anyone any the wiser as to why we signed Simic?
Here’s a scenario for you that would be too daft for words at other clubs, but, because it’s Cardiff City involved, it might possibly be true. We see that Sunderland are interested in signing Simic and so think “he must be good and we’re desperate for a striker”, so you offer more to Simic’s club and to the player than Sunderland (always assuming they were really after him) and complete the signing, only for it to become clear very quickly in training that the player is nowhere near ready for Championship football yet. Therefore, the manager at the time gets told to inform the media that Simic is a “club project” and is being loaned out to Kortrijk who, it turns out, have no use for him.
Simic returned to City in January having featured very little for Kortrijk and has spent his time since then playing for our under 21 team where he has shown some ability as a finisher and a slow, but gradual, improvement in his all round play.
There’s been something of a clamour from fans to see Simic play for the first team and maybe he would have come on as a sub on Saturday if it were not for Calum Chambers’ red card, but I’m not convinced he’s good enough for the first team yet based on what I’ve seen of him in the under 21s.
Despite the opinions expressed at the time about us having a good transfer window, the league table does not lie and the recruitment last summer was not good enough. There’s no two ways about that – who out of the players recruited last summer could now be called a good signing? I’d say Alex Robertson was the best, but his displays from January onwards mean that he was the best of a bad bunch.
The January window could be called more of a success, but only because of Yousef Salech – Will Alves flattered to deceive and, although I’d be happy to see Sivert Mannsverk back here next season, his performances certainly didn’t justify the sort of fee we’d have to pay for him.
Like so many things at Cardiff City, our recruitment procedures have been shown to be unfit for puropse in recent years.
COACHING
I’m going to use Jesper Daland to try and make a point about the standard of coaching at first team level. I think it’s fair to say that all City fans were impressed by Daland’s debut at Swansea – I try not to go too over the top about players making their debuts, but I remember thinking that he looked like he could be an upgrade on Mark McGuinness whose sale had been for about three times what we paid for Daland.
The following week, Daland had to go off at half time with an injury caused by one of his team mates (think it might have been Perry Ng) and he never looked the same player again. Now, you cannot rule out the player having problems settling at his new club, but you do have to wonder about the standard of coaching at the club when you see how Daland was performing once he had returned to fitness – he had regressed as a player.
Meanwhile, Will Fish, another signed out of the proceeds of the McGuinness sale, was a permanent non playing sub through the first half of the season, yet, when he finally got his chance, he showed himself to be the best of our centrebacks. Okay, that’s not much of a compliment given how we played in that position through the season, but we’re always being told that our opinions aren’t valid because we don’t get to see what happens in training,.However, you have to wonder why no one on the coaching staff could see that Fish might have been worth a go in the starting line up from September through to january.
Coaching is supposed to be about improving players, but what first team players can you say have definitely improved over the period they’ve been working with the first team staff at City in recent years? I maintain Daland became a worse player the more coaching he received at Cardiff, while someone like Cian Ashford, who I feel was the biggest single reason for the improvement in results and performances we saw through January, was playing worse in April than he was when he was given his, belated, chance around the turn of the year.
Omer Riza was given a makeshift and depleted coaching staff to work with during his time in temporary charge and only one newcomer was brought in when we he was given the job until the end of the season. Once again, you get the distinct impression that a club that is always paying over the odds when it comes to transfer fees and wages for players is trying to do things on the cheap when it comes to all other staff.
ADMINISTRATION
Thjis one should be the easiest of the lot – have at least some full time staff at the top of the club who are on hand at the ground to deal with matters as they arise. Such people should have more knowledge of the game than the present incumbents do and there should be less secrecy!
MEDICAL
To be fair, this could be more down to a feeling of Cardiff City being a club where everything is going wrong than a problem with the department concerned. However, we did seem to have more injuries (particularly ones to hamstrings) through the season just ended compared to normal and there seemed to be more cases of players suffering from “setbacks” in their recovery. As I say, there may not be a problem here, but does the “doing things on the cheap” attitude extend to the treatment rooms?
I’m sure there’s other things I could come up with given time, but that’s more than enough for now. It still feels like I should do something more player related before leaving 24/25 behind and I can see me doing at least one more piece before I revert to the normal weekly review pieces that continue on through the summer.
