Seven decades of Cardiff City v Swansea City matches.

Posted on January 16, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

A fortnight into the January transfer window and about a fortnight earlier than it usually takes us to start signing anyone, it looks like Cardiff City are about to bring in a striker. Six foot five inch Yousef Salech is twenty two, Danish qualified, has a Polish mother, a Palestinian father and I’d never heard of him before yesterday!

The fee involved is around £4 million and, looking at Salech’s record up to now, his signing represents a gamble, because there is the usual mixture of positives and negatives that you tend to get when City sign a striker. Before getting on to them, I’d say that my reaction to learning the news was a negative one, but, a bit more time and thought has made me rethink that view to some degree.

If you aren’t going to use the loan market, then you have to face the fact that the UK market for strikers in.particular is grossly inflated. We were never going to sign someone playing in the English league system who would guarantee us fifteen to twenty goals a season because, if they exist, they are way out of our price range – similarly, I’d guess a young player with a similar record to Salech would leave us with little change from £10 million if he were with a Premier League or EFL club.

Salech’s current club is Sirius and they play in the top division in Sweden. He started off with HIK who are in the third tier of Danish football and his seven goals in twenty matches for them prompted one of Denmark’s biggest clubs, Brondby, to sign him while a teenager on a four year deal. Loaned out to second tier club Koge in 2022, Salech responded with an impressive fifteen goals from twenty five games.

All pretty good so far then, but with him struggling to make progress at his parent club, another loan to Belgian side Beveren through the early part of last season did not go so well – in a league where Isaak Davies and Wilfried Kanga both made it into double figures on the goal front, Salech scored just once in sixteen appearances. After this, with him having failed to score in nine appearances for Brondby, they decided to sell him to Sirius for a reported fee of £500,000 in February of last year.

Salech scored eleven goals in twenty seven league appearances for Sirius which isn’t bad at all in a league which would probably compares quite closely to the Championship, so, again, that makes me feel quite positive about him. However, to go with those poor figures at Beveren, it must be noted that the Swedish domestic season ended in November, so, effectively, Salech would be coming here needing the equivalent of a pre season fitness programme to get fully up to match speed – there’s also an interview with a Swedish journalist doing the rounds on Wales Online saying that, after starting very well for Sirius, he picked up an injury which kept him out for a while and he didn’t look the same player when he came back.

Therefore, I see reasons for optimism in this transfer, but, by the same token, there is enough evidence there for you to take a more downbeat attitude if you so wish. Like most of our foreign signings, the truth is that City supporters know little or nothing about them and your attitude depends as much as anything on whether you’re a glass half full or half empty person.

I’ll finisn on Salech by saying that he’s the third young Danish striker we’ve signed in the Tan era. Andreas Cornelius has to be viewed as a failure, but that had a lot to do with a lack of patience being shown in him – his subsequent career indicates that he would have become a good player for City at Championship level in particular. Likewise, Kenneth Zohore has to be judged a failure, but there was that period of a year or so under Neil Warnock when he had to be regarded as one of the best strikers in the Championship. If Salech could come in and have a similar impact as Zohore did in the 17/18 period, particularly if he displays something like Zohore’s pace, then I’d be a lot more optimistic about our survival prospects this season.

Back to the fight to stay up though, Saturday sees Swansea visiting us and I’m struck by what seems to be a positive attitude among many City fans towards a fixture which they would usually tend to dread.

I can understand the optimism to an extent. The jacks were flying around Christmas time, but manager Luke Williams put through his own net somewhat when questioned about reports linking him with the West Bromwich Albion manager’s job and since then visits to the two Solent area clubs, both struggling in their respective leagues, have been lost by an aggregate of seven to nil.

However, with us only winning less than one in five league games we play, I’m at the stage where me being optimistic is a prediction of us drawing a match – if we can’t win against a team playing as poorly as Watford did on Tuesday, then I have a serious problem in believing that a Swansea side that will, no doubt, be up for the occasion, will leave defeated on the weekend.

On to the quiz then, I’ll post the answers on Sunday.

60s. Starting off with a team which had a foot in both camps so to speak, this forward’s first Football League team were a complete opposite as there was no room for debate on that score with them. He didn’t get anywhere with them though and moved north to a place with a famous ball retrieval scheme at the time still awaiting the first Football League appearance of his career. The next fourteen years saw him alternating between this club and Swansea with a short spell halfway through spent with blues on the way to the capital thrown in for good measure. On the international front, a career spent almost exclusively in the lower divisions did him few favours, but, even so, he managed to score a goal every other game in his twelve appearances for his country. Who am I describing?

70s. Jockstrap?

80s. Which Swansea player is credited with becoming the first ever vegan footballer and was the first vegan to score a goal in the old First Division? His first encounter with City as a jack resulted in a defeat and was just before he made the switch from vegetarian to vegan.

90s. Start opening and place coins on forward (5,6).

00s.UK folk rockers now, but maybe Dad was once Swansea’s youngest ever Player of the Year?

10s. Which former Swansea player captained his team in the FA Cup this week more than twenty one years after making his first appearance in professional football in a League Cup match?

20s. Church in village near Caerphilly maybe, now to be found in Portugal, after a few months in Swansea, but based in Greece. Who or what am I describing?

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Two more points chucked away as Cardiff City’s win rate drops below 20 per cent.

Posted on January 15, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

Cardiff City took their unbeaten run to five matches tonight, but at the same time ticked another of those boxes that mark them out as a probable relegation team. Struggling sides at home against an out of form team that are looking like one of the worst visiting outfits seen all season simply have to win when they go 1-0 up. City didn’t, they conceded with three minutes left, then tried their best to lose the point they had as baffling substitutions left them hanging on through the five minutes of added time as the opposition, Watford, realised they had a chance of snatching a ridiculous win given how ninety per cent of the match panned out.

Watford looked like a team that had lost four straight matches and for all but the final eight minutes or so seemed resigned to their fate. Although the BBC’s stats, surprisingly, indicate a very even game, City won the physical battle throughout and when they scored on sixty five minutes, it seemed there’d only be one winner, but that was the signal for them to take a backward step and, although they looked comfortable enough in the following twenty minutes, this is a team that hasn’t kept a clean sheet in the league for three months. So, although the desire to preserve the lead was understandable to an extent, City were well on top when they scored and a second goal looked on the cards.

City continued with Rubin Colwill leading the attack and this time he played more like a proper nine than a false one, but, in a very poor first half, all they did despite generally edging it was show the sort of lack of attacking understanding and combination play that has plagued them at home in particular this season.

It took Watford eighty seven minutes to get an effort on goal, and it earned them their point, so there was little from them to suggest a goal, but, by the same token, they were comfortable at the back as City’s attacking limitations gave them hardly anything to worry about.

We did have the only two on target efforts of the half. In saying that, Alex Robertson’s dribbler from twenty yards may have been going just wide as Jonathan Bond dived to make an easy save, but the keeper was much more impressive in turning Chris Willock’s shot from the corner of the penalty area aside as the winger tried to bend his effort into the far corner.

The first forty five minutes looked like either a 0-0 or one of those games that would produce just the one decisive goal, but the second period suggested one of the two teams could go on to win more comfortably than that.

It’s not been very often this season, particularly at home, when you could suggest that a City goal was coming, but, after a quiet first ten minutes or so, that’s how it felt as the game neared the hour mark.

Watford had escaped when a Robertson corner bounced free just short of their line only for defender Matt Pollock to scramble the ball clear. Shortly after that, Colwill’s shot from twenty yards was not cleanly struck, but rolled only a yard or so wide and then, when Jesper Daland headed down to Perry Ng, the full back’s volley from around the penalty spot was diverted around the post by a defender.

 Next, Colwill was inches away from reaching a Dimi Goutas header when any sort of contact must have seen him score, but, just as I was beginning to think that all of the pressure would come to nothing, the player who seems to me to be the only one in the senior squad who can challenge Callum Robinson for the title of best finisher showed the others how to do it.

There was luck involved as ricochets helped Robertson and our best player on the night, Callum Chambers, but when the ball found it’s way to Cian Ashford, he took a touch and then finished crisply from fifteen yards.

That should have been that and, although City’s attacking intent was quite substantially reduced after that, they still had two great chances to make the points safe. The forst came when Ollie Tanner, on as a sub for Willock, gave Pollock the chance to clear for a corner with a pass aimed at the unmarked Robertson that was not good enough and then when Ashford was somewhat greedy, understandable in view of his confidence at the moment maybe, when he opted to shoot instead of passing to better placed colleagues inside him.

Tanner had come on a few minutes after our goal and he was followed ten minutes later by Yakou Meite coming on for Colwill. However, surprisingly, Omer Riza delayed any other substitutions until almost the very end as Joel Bagan and Joe Ralls were ready to come on as defensive substitutes for Robertson and Ashford when Watford launched an attack.

City defenders had been getting first contact on balls into our box and down the channels all night, but when Andy Rinomhota was penalised for a foul out on our left some thirty yards from goal, City were grateful for Meite’s sliced clearance past the far post as a couple of Watford players closed in on a dangerous dead ball delivery. 

The resultant corner saw City struggle to clear and an isolated Callum O’Dowda was made to pay for not getting to the ball first as Kwadko Baah got to the bye line and crossed for the unmarked Vakoun Bayo to head in from inside the six yard box.

If that was a real kick in the guts, Riza’s decision to go ahead with the substitutions he had planned at 1-0 was just bizarre- this was a game we had to win and yet he went ahead with his shut up shop changes with the result that we barely crossed the halfway line after that. 

Indeed Watford could have won it as Jak Alnwick had to make a good save to keep out a shot by sub Rocco Vata and so, although our point takes us out of the bottom three, it’s now five victories out of twenty six and we’ve got no chance of staying up unless that win rate starts to improve quite dramatically.

Sadly, it seems the mid season break has had a negative effect on the under 21s who had been the bright spot of this miserable campaign. While the 5-1 thumping at Ipswich last week was understandable to a large extent because of the number of Academy youngsters involved, it was a much stronger team in action at Leckwith this afternoon against league leaders Brentford, but they could have few complaints about a 3-0 loss that didn’t flatter the visitors at all. I thought Dylan Lawlor did pretty well on what was a testing afternoon and Isaac Jeffries showed up well in attack at times, but there was little to enthuse about as it begins to look as if our second string might be in for a difficult second half to the season.

Posted in Out on the pitch, The stiffs | Tagged , | 3 Comments