I remember when City let Dave Jones go thirteen years ago, I had a sense of excitement about the naming of his replacement and joined in fully with all of the speculation as to who the new boss should and would be, but those days are long gone now. When we sack a manager, there isn’t excitement on my part, just a resignation that the City hierarchy had got the appointment wrong (again) in the first place and an acceptance that they’ll get it wrong again.
Some of the sackings since Dave Jones have caught me on the hop (e.g. Steve Morison and, to a lesser extent, Sabri Lamouchi) and others have seemed overdue (e.g. Mick McCarthy and, to some extent, Neil Warnock’s departure), but I don’t tend to be pleased to see a manager go these days – Erol Bulut is an exception though.
Before anyone says anything, I accept that judgment will be taken as a very harsh one by some and I think it’s fair to say that Bulut is rated so poorly by me because, to a degree, I’ve been worn. down by a decade and more of almost uninterrupted ineptitude in the running of the club I support. I may have had more patience with Erol Bulut if we were a more stable club, but it became clear to me pretty quickly that we had made yet another poor appointment and, frankly, I’d had enough of him by the time he was having his first set of public disagreements with the Board over the January transfer window.
For a while though, Bulut’s Cardiff were an improvement on what had gone before and, in stark contrast to what they became, they were brave and positive in an undeserved defeat at Ipswich after coming through very tough opening away fixtures at Leeds and Leicester with just one point, but quite a bit of encouragement – the League Cup win at Birmingham was one of the most enjoyable City games I’ve seen in ages as well.
With the exception of the hopeless capitulation at Rotherham on the final day of the season, Bulut’s Cardiff were competitive and pretty successful away from home in 23/24. Yes, there were poor days like Plymouth and Norwich, but City were pretty resilient on their travels even if the fluency seen early on at Portman Road and St Andrews soon became a thing of the past.
Bulut never worked out the conundrum of our long running issues when playing at home though. He did do himself a lot of good with deserved early season victories in the home derbies against Swansea and Bristol City though and the fact that we earned memorable late season Cardiff City Stadium victories over promoted pair Ipswich and Southampton gave support to those who argued for continuity and gradual rebuilding on the managerial front.
So, there were four home games to recall with affection and enjoyment during last season, but, frankly, I’m trying to forget about the other nineteen – my biggest bugbear with Erol Bulut was that so many of his games in charge, particularly at home, were so DULL.
The thing is while a cautious attitude was justified to an extent in a team like us in a division as competitive as the Championship, it became the same home and away. – try to stay in the game as long as you can and try to nick a goal through a moment of individual brilliance or, far more commonly, a goal from a free kick or corner.
In truth, there was a degree of reducing Ipswich to our own lecel when we beat them and Southampton should have been out of sight long before our improbable comeback inspired by the youngsters Bulut refused to use in Championship fixtures unless they had nothing riding on the them for us.
However, two runs of four straight victories at either end of the campaign played a big part in ensuring that Erol Bulut’s one completed season will be looked at in the future as a successful one that ended two years of relegation fighting.
Twelfth with nineteen wins (only one team outside the top six won more) has to be seen as progress although I’ll always argue that 23/24 was, perhaps the most bizarre season of my City supporting life – you scratch below the surface a bit and a different story emerges.
For example, only two Championship teams lost more matches than us (we were beaten more times than relegated Birmingham and Rotherham), only three teams conceded more goals than our seventy, we were twenty first in the possession table and the goal attempts per game one, top of the goals scored from dead ball situations table and bottom of the goals scored in open play one.
Those stats in the paragraph above give some clue as to how dull a team Erol Bulut’s Cardiff were last season, but they don’t give details as to how the way the team set up didn’t vary wherever we were playing. Team selection was conservative with the view expressed by Turkish journalists at the time of his appointment that his optimum age for a player was twenty nine being confirmed in the teams he picked,, he was also described as cautious tactically and he was certainly that and then some!
I’ll credit Erol Bulut for his visits to pubs in Cardiff and the valleys in an attempt to get to know the area and the club’s supporters and he also was shrewd enough to get the local media onside (right to the end, that is the pre and post Leeds briefings, the media seemed supportive of him and, from memory, there were no dissenting voices among them when it came to the great will, he won’t he contract debate of the spring and early summer – they all were in favour of him being given a new deal).
Indeed, looking at Twitter (X) and reading the websites of the likes of Wales Online and BBC Wales during this time, those of us who preferred to see a new manager appointed appeared to be in a very small minority (every national Championship podcast I watched or listened to were in the you can’t sack him after a mid table finish camp as well). However, when I spoke to City fans I knew, looked on messageboards and read the feedback on here, it was a different response I was seeing.
Of course, our nightmare start to the current season has changed the balance and it shows how bad things got in the past six weeks or so that there were very few, if any, fighting the manager’s corner when the end came.
Given more to spend during the summer than any City manager since Neil Warnock in 2019 and an encouraging pre season set of results behind him, Erol Bulut must have been a confident boss as he prepared to face Sunderland in the season opener. Unfortunately, after dominating the opening fifteen minutes, the kind of soft goal conceded from a set piece which has been the harbinger of so many home defeats in recent years saw any feelgood factor vanish far too quickly and, although the first half against Burnley and the last twenty minutes against the jacks offered some hope of progress, the stats of one point, one goal scored and thirteen conceded says it all. For me, there’s been hope we can be competitive for a total of about an hour of the five hundred and forty minutes we’ve played – for the rest of the time, it really has been as bad as those figures suggest.
What didn’t help Bulut was that, the one goal we’ve scored and the improved form in the Swansea game was down to three of the players he’s been publicly critical of (more on that shortly), while the two League Cup games in which the youngsters he’s never been prepared to pick in league games that weren’t end of season affairs with nothing riding on them have been given a chance saw us score five times!
Throughout his time at City, Erol Bulut would bemoan the missing of chances by his team after losses. Very occasionally, he had a point, but most of the time, it appeared that his definition of what constitutes a chance differed from every one else’s. This continued into the current season and continued in his monologue in Thursday’s pre Leeds press briefing in which he railed at “critics” and bemoaned his luck with all of the chances his side was missing despite there being barely any evidence that these chances actually existed (I honestly cannot remember more than two or three good goalscoring opportunities we’ve missed in the six matches).
That game at Ipswich I mentioned earlier where we played some really good football at times also offered the first signs of our new manager’s failings. Ollie Tanner was given a first league start in that match and was generally reckoned to have done pretty well, only to be withdrawn at half time, with us leading 1-0, with his manager talking post match of unspecified errors the young winger had made – the game was eventually lost 3-2, from 2-0 up, as Bulut made defensive substitutions and, for no obvious reason, had dropped the in form goalkeeper Jac Alnwick
Since then, Tanner has been publicly criticised by his manager on a few occasions with the last one being only two or three weeks ago when Bulut talked of him carrying too much weight. It’s not just Tanner who Bulut has not been happy with, Rubin Colwill has constantly been told about his lack of defensive work (another of Bulut’s bugbears with Tanner) and many have seen the manager’s treatment of the young Welsh international as akin to that of a scapegoat as Colwill, invariably, found himself the one to carry the can for a poor team performance as he was invariably the one to be omitted.
Callum Robinson is another one Bulut went public on his misgivings about. Again, the manager talked of wanting more from the player in terms of his game without the ball, but, whereas Colwill and Tanner have remained regular members of the first team squad, Robinson has featured very little for around a year now. For a long spell of last season, Robinson was not selected because of what Bulut first described as an injury and then it was illness. In the summer there was talk of Robinson coming back to training in peak condition and his goals in pre season suggested we had someone who was almost like a new striker given how little he’d been involved in 23/24. Robinson remains the only player to score a league goal for us this season, but , again, is missing games with vaguely described injuries – indeed, he was absent from the squad on Saturday and at Derby, despite having come on as a sub for the Republic of Ireland during the in international break.
Now I’m not very good at noticing signs of things like a manager losing a dressing room, but I watchrd on Saturday and thought I saw some indications of it and with it being said that some former and current City players have responded positively to the Instagram message announcing Erol Bulut’s sacking, there might be something to such talk this time. Of course, any manager is likely to have made a few of his players disgrunteld with him if he was in charge for the length of time Bulut was with us.
That’s the thing, I make Erol Bulut our longest serving manager since Neil Warnock and I think I’m right in saying that his year and a quarter in charge is about the average time in the job for a manager of a Championship club these days. There’s also the fact that, like Mick McCarthy before him, Bulut managed to get himself a new contract a few games before he was sacked.
We’ve had six manager’s since Warnock left just under five years ago and you could make a case for saying that after Neil Harris, who got us to the Play Offs and left with us in a league position we’d love to occupy at the moment, Erol Bulut is the second most successful out of them.
That really goes to the heart of how poorly we’ve been run in that time and for the large majority of the time since 2010 when Vincent Tan completed his takeover of the club. I could go on for some time now about the need for things like Directors of Football and a clear club philosophy which survives the coming and going of different managers, but what’s the point when you know none of it’s going to happen while Vincent Tan is in charge?
Apart from Neil Warnock and, I would argue, Malky Mackay, the club have always made bad managerial appointments under Vincent Tan’s ownership and, realistically, if that was to change with the next appointment being successful enough to be added to that pair of promotion winning managers, you’d have to think that it owed more to luck than judgment.
Although there are disturbing signs of us being cast adrift at the bottom of the league even this early in the season, the reality is that there is plenty of time yet for the new manager to turn things around if they are in place within the next month or so. Therefore, it could well be that the new man (even with the current lot in charge, I think we can assume it will be a man!) will save us from the drop (after all, the current odds on us being relegated are 13/8, that is, well above an even chance), but the way things have gone for the past three years or so has convinced me that we are going to go down pretty soon without a change of ownership.
So, I think the club’s hierarchy and the manager who started the season in charge were not good enough, that leaves the third party in this mess – the players. I’ve heard and read a lot in the last month or so that we are too good on paper to go down and I look at the signings we made this summer and some of the youngsters coming through and agree with that sentiment.
However, team performances have been woeful so far and if I were to ask who would be our best player of the season so far if you don’t include the likes of Jesper Daland and Will Fish who have barely featured so far, I honestly cannot come up with a convincing candidate – I suppose it would be Rubin Colwill, but that would be more because of his League Cup performances.
Daland and Fish have looked pretty good so far, but they’ve not had the time to be sucked into all of the negativity and ineptitude at Cardiff yet. Of the other new players, Alex Robertson’s treatment by Bulut was baffling, given that he’d done pretty well when given his chance, but Callum Chambers has looked pretty poor in the last three games. Chris Willock has lost his starting place already, Anwar El Ghazi was always going to take a long time to recover his sharpness given his long time out of the game, but I see little sign of improvement in him yet. Finally, as for poor Wilfried Kanga, I’m increasingly looking forward to the return to fitness of Kion Etete because, as things stand, I reckon he’s the best centre forward we have at the club – who would have believed that back in the summer amid all of the talk of established strikers arriving who would shock and awe us!
There is the chance that Erol Bulut had completely lost the dressing room and we’ll see a totally transformed team at Hull next weekend I suppose, but we need to appreciate that we’ve been a mediocre Championship team for a good few years now, so it seems unlikely. Yes, I can accept that there will be some improvement, but enough to lift us clear enough of the bottom three for relegation not to be a consideration through the majority of the season? I don’t think so, certainly not without us rediscovering our ability to score from set pieces.
My theory, which I’ve just thought of, is that if all three out of a club’s Board/owner, manager and squad are poor, you’ve got no chance, if two of them are poor, you might be able to just about keep your head above water and if one of them is, you can survive quite safely given time to improve the squad if that’s the weakness.
If that theory holds water, then it becomes pretty important that our selection panel for the new manager with their dismal record so far, come up with a Warnock or Mackay rather than another Trollope or Ole. For me, the outstanding candidate is Tony Mowbray if he is over the health issues which caused him to step down at Birmingham with Steven Schumacher as a good second choice.
I’m assuming a couple of things there, first that both would be willing to work for an owner as erratic as Vincent Tan (I couldn’t blame them of they weren’t) and second, that we won’t be going after someone already in a job.
