I’m going to start off this week by clearing up the Crawley mystery! Regular readers will now that in my previous two weekly pieces, I made reference to a “phantom” friendly game with Crawley that I heard Eli King mention in his spell as a co commentator in our game against Cork. Apart from that though, there was nothing to confirm that such a match was taking place and I was reduced to speculating last week whether a random message I saw on the club’s Twitter page was actually referring to the game in question.
Well, it seems we did play Crawley in a behind closed doors game about ten days ago. For reasons I can’t begin to guess, it seems the club didn’t want any details of it in the public domain even after the event, but it seems that we won by 5-1 and the only other detail I have is that, fresh from his brace against Cork, seventeen year old Rob Tankewicz scored another couple of goals.
What is definitely true is that City won their game at Forest Green seven days ago by the same score – I know that because I watched a live stream of the match and, for the first quarter of it, City were superb.
Yes, I know it was non league opposition and Forest Green were very error prone and open at the back early in the game, but City were completely dominant until the dreaded hydration break intervened and home manager Robbie Savage was able to tighten things up for his side. As an aside, it’s good to see the EFL announcing plans to eliminate the “tactical” injuries to goalkeepers which by the end of last season had, effectively, turned a match into a four quartered affair even if the temperature did not come remotely close to meriting a hydration break.
Back to the Forest Green game, Savage’s intervention. came too late to save his team. If it ever was a meaningful contest, it stopped being one when Yousef Salech made it 4-0 with just over twenty minutes played.
If there is such a thing as BBM ball, then our first goal was as good an advertisement for it as his Cardiff team has ever come up with as they moved the ball the ball smoothly and patiently from their own left corner flag diagonally across the pitch so that a few seconds later, Ronan Kpakio was crossing low to Isaak Davies who swept the ball in from eight yards on the near post.
It really was a lovely goal and well worth a look at on the club website if you’ve not seen it yet. Chris Willock, given the captaincy for the day, cut in from the left to place a right footed shot beyond the keeper from twenty yards to double the lead and he was on hand to score easily from six yards to end a scramble that had begun when Salech capitalised on the home side’s attempt to play out from the back going wrong. Within a couple more minutes, the striker had a goal of his own as he ran on uncontested and placed his shot beyond a goalkeeper who must have been fearing he might be on his way to conceding ten at the time.
However, after the hydration break, the game became a more competitive affair with Forest Green improving and City getting a bit sloppy – understandable to a large degree in a match which had been almost too easy for them at times.
Willock was able to complete a first half hat trick when he converted a penalty awarded for a hand ball. by a defender minutes before the break and the home side were able to win the second half by netting its only goal past Nathan Trott who was making his first appearance of the season.
Eli King also got twenty odd minutes in as he was one of a number of substitutes introduced by BBM in the second half (one of them being sixteen year old centreback Noah Anyadike who, apparently, was involved in first team training sessions at the age of fourteen). King, understandably, looked a little rusty at times, but in some respects he has the feel of a new signing after his ACL injury made the 25/26 campaign a write off for him. It’s also worth noting that despite Trott and King’s availability, PerryNg, Calum Chambers, Dylan Lawlor (who’s not kicked a ball in pre season yet), Rubin Colwill and Cian Ashford were all not available for whatever reason and I’d say you could make a case for all of them being in out strongest team if the league season. was starting today.
Maybe I’m keen to call King a new signing because we still await the first confirmation of one since Trott signed permanently for us months ago. This is despite efforts both in the local media and on social media to tell us that our pre season is on the brink of taking off on the incoming transfers front.
Indeed, a Wales Online journalist generally thought to have good and reliable contacts within the club wrote a piece in midweek claiming that City were confident of bringing in three players in the coming week and this did not include Jens Hjerto-Dahl where negotiations with his club Tromso lumber on at snail like speed.
There have been developments regarding the Norwegian under 21 international’s future in the past week. It seems that Premier League Hull City had him scouted on Thursday in Tromso’s 3-1 defeat by Hradec Kralove in the second leg of their Europa League qualifying tie.
Dahl was withdrawn on the night with twenty minutes or so left and he admitted afterwards that he hadn’t been at his best. In the same interview, the player admitted to being “excited” by all of the transfer speculation and hinted that, hardly surprisingly, he would welcome the chance to play in the Premier League – although my opinion is that Hull are virtual certs for relegation back to the Championship.
You could speculate that if Hull’s scouts saw Dahl not have his best game, then they may not take their interest any further. However, from a City perspective, it seems to me that Tromso’s exit from Europe on a 4-1 aggregate score offers us a chance to try and break the logjam by maybe making one or two changes in the structure of the bid we’ve made (e.g a bit more up front, a slightly bigger percentage of any sell on fee or something like an additional payment after Dahl has played, say, twenty five games) in the hope of making a breakthrough. If none of this worked, then, if it was my decision to make, I’d walk away from negotiations and start looking elsewhere for someone to play in the area of the pitch where our need is most pressing.
The Wales Online article offered no indication as to the identity of any of the three players who are supposed to be arriving in the next week other than to repeat the line that we’re looking to strengthen at left back, in midfield, on the wing and up front.
A couple of City podcasts (including the one that was telling us last week that we’d have signed Jens Dahl by now) had a go at predicting who the three players are and, if nothing else, the fact that they came up with six different names probably tells you one of them at least needs to change their sources!
The onlyauthentic transfer activity to report is that young midfielder/forward Trey George has joined Darren Purse’s Sligo Rovers on loan for the rest of the Irish league season.
The big news I suppose is that BBM, his assistant Lee Riley and Head of Performance Kevin Gibbins have all extended their contracts by a further year to 2029 . While it’s easy to say that contracts in modern day football are not worth the paper they’re written on, I take this as a positive sign as it does show that club and coaches seem united in how they want the club to progress – I say that mind, fully aware that newly signed contracts have not stopped Vincent Tan wielding the axe in the past!
Also, it’s been reported that we have identified who we want to replace Gavin Ward as our goalkeeping coach – indeed, it’s been claimed that he’s already in place.
Below first team level, the under 21s had what I’ll call a learning experience last weekend against Torquay United at Plainmoor – four down at half time, they were eventually beaten 5-0 There was better news of the under 18s in midweek as they edged home 4-3 against Plymouth.
Lastly, I just want to say that I’ve finally been worn down in recent weeks by Elon Musk’s X and so, with apologies to anyone who uses that platform to read the blog, I will no longer post links to my posts on there – from now on, I’ll be posting on Blue Sky.
