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?
