About eight minutes into the first team’s final game of the season at Burnley on Monday, Mahlon Romeo got free down City’s right and pulled a low cross back to around the penalty spot. It was one of those passes just crying out to be hit into the net and homing in on it was a member of the first team squad among the best equipped, possibly the best equipped, to give it the finish it deserved.
What happened next is not clear to me, it looked like Rubin Colwill (for it was he!) opted to send an accurate pass to Connor Wickham who was stood in an offside position about four yards from goal, but why would he do that with what was such an excellent goalscoring opportunity? It was hard to come to any other conclusion than that Colwill had attempted a shot and he’d got it all wrong.
I mentioned in my blog piece on the match that those one or two seconds summed up a season that had just not got started properly for the player who had been given the big build up and just did not deliver during 22/23. The miss mattered little as the game was a dead rubber, but, equally it mattered little that, in a game where City were completely outgunned, what good football we played in the first half tended to see Colwill involved somewhere along the way, yet it did not stop the youngster being substituted at half time.
Now, I find it disappointing that in a game which seemed to be ideal for Sabri Lamouchi to see how four of his younger players fared over ninety minutes against testing opposition, Colwill, Isaak Davies, Eli King and Joel Bagan played barely an hour and a half between them. However, in Colwill’s case, you cannot really criticise the manager’s decision to only give him half a game as unfair – put it this way, I was not surprised at all to hear that he was one of the two players who had been withdrawn at the interval.
If I had to come up with a single word to describe Rubin Colwill’s season it would be exasperation – it must have been for the player and it certainly was for this supporter. I’ve been through anger that he has been held back by bloody “growing pains” (a condition that, according to the research I’ve done on it, is usually confined to kids in their late teens (Colwill was twenty one about a fortnight ago), anger at the club for what I thought was them dragging their feet in the treatment of the condition and frustration at all of the other niggles and knocks which have also helped make this season such a stop, start one for the player. However, just as the season is ending, I’ve come to the overdue conclusion that, as someone who has been receiving their state pension for fifteen months, I should be a bit more mature about the matter and accept that it’s just pure bad luck as much as anything that has held back Colwill so much.
There will be those who look at Colwill’s recent first team performances and say that it’s hardly as if we’re missing much when he’s out. That’s a hard line to argue against currently, especially when you see the player make a mess of the opportunity Lamouchi offered him of playing in the number ten role many of Colwill’s supporters, like me, say he is best suited to in his very first game in charge at Luton. However, anyone who saw Colwill look a class above the rest in Wales under 21 team’s 3-0 win over Scotland in March would have to admit that we’re talking about a seriously talented player here.
After Monday’s game, our manager was asked what his team needed most over the course of the summer and he answered more creativity. If Rubin Colwill, who has seen his pre season training disrupted in both of the last two years, can get a full pre season behind him this time and come into the 23/24 campaign in better shape than he was at any time this season, then Lamouchi potentially has a player already at the club who could provide a goodly share of that commodity he wants for the team.
Strangely for a player that his country clearly rates as someone of great promise (he was picked in front of Brennan Johnson in the Wales squad for the 2021 Euros), the coming season has something of a make or break look to it for Rubin Colwill when it comes to club football considering that his contract is up next summer.
Rubin is the not the only Colwill at the club though, his younger brother Joel started this season as a regular in City under 21 team’s midfield, then sustained an injury which kept him out for much of the middle of the season before returning to the side in the last few weeks.
Yesterday Joel played in the under 21 side’s season finale at Leckwith against Crewe Alexandra which was won by 4-2 to secure fourth place for Darren Purse’s team in the league of ten sides they compete in every year.
I found this match to be one of the most entertaining and encouraging Cardiff City games I’ve watched all season. Granted, you can say that the competition for such a description is as weak as it’s been for a while this year, but this was so heartening for me for a few reasons which I’ll come to later, suffice it for now to say that it’s been a while since I’ve seen a Cardiff side display such attacking talent that was sustained over the ninety minutes.
Of course, allowances have to be made for the standard the game was played at – Crewe finished eighth in the ten team Northern Section and I’ve no idea how young their side was yesterday, but it was still an impressive showing particularly bearing in mind the unusual City selection for the game.
The reasons why I use the word unusual are twofold. First, this was a very young side featuring four of the seven City players selected in the Welsh under 17 squad selected for the Euros beginning in Hungary shortly – Wales face the hosts in their first game a week today (kick off 7pm), then it’s the Republic of Ireland on 20 May at 3.30pm before their group winds up with a 7pm kick off against Poland on the 23 rd. It’s is the first time Wales have qualified for the Finals of an age group tournament since an Under 18 side featuring Mark Hughes beat Belgium and Greece to finish second in their group in 1981.
So, you can see what an achievement it is for Wales to reach the Under 17s Finals and I would argue that, apart from possibly the achievement of the Women’s team in winning a domestic league and cup double, having seven City players in the under 17 squad (plus two others in Charlie Crew and Gabrielle Biabcheri, now at Leeds and Manchester United respectively, who are former Academy players of ours) is the highspot of Cardiff City’s 22/23 campaign.
Yesterday’s back four contained three Wales squad members in Dylan Lawlor, Luey Giles and Josh Beecher, while attacking midfielder Cody Twose was introduced as a second half sub – the other three members of the Wales squad with the club are goalkeepers Luke Armstrong and Lewys Benjamin and midfielder Troy Perrett.
Returning to Joel Colwill, it was great to see that, at eighteen, he was one of the more senior players in the team alongside twenty year old captain Owen Pritchard, nineteen year old striker James Crole and fellow eighteen year old Cian Ashford – I think I’m right in saying that the rest of the squad were all first year scholars who would also have been qualified for the Welsh under 17 squad.
Besides being so young, I’m pretty sure that all of the starting eleven, plus the five subs, were Welsh – something I think should be celebrated because I’ll be surprised if we see it too often in the future!
Everyone in blue came out of the game with credit, but pick of the bunch for me was the younger Colwill. I must say though that, if you watched them play in the same team from a distance far enough away not to notice the facial similarities, you’d never guess they were brothers.
Whereas Rubin has his critics for what could be called a languid style that could perhaps do with more urgency, the perpetual motion Joel is urgency personified – he never seems to stop moving! Yesterday, Joel gave an excellent box to box midfielder performance as, very impressively for someone who missed a big chunk of the season through injury, he was still going as strong in the ninetieth minute as he had been in the first.
If that makes him sound like just a workhorse, it’s unfair because he’s a perceptive passer, willing to do his bit defensively and where he showed a similarity with his brother was in his ability to get away good quality shots from around the edge of the penalty area – there were a couple of occasions where his shots had the Crewe keeper beaten, but flashed just wide.
If Colwill was my man of the match, Ashford was not far behind him. More of a Rubin type than a Joel, Ashford showed tremendous skill and a fair bit of strength in the opening minute as he kept possession of the ball for about fifteen seconds despite having four opponents trying to rob him of possession. Eventually, Ashford helped force the corner from which Pritchard put us ahead with a twenty five yard shot with less than sixty seconds showing on the clock on the stream I was watching.
Not everything Ashford tried came off, but a lot of it did and he’s another one with the creativity Lamouchi craves.
As I mentioned earlier, no one looked out of place in the City side despite their tender years, but I’ll pick out one other in Luey Giles who may well be one to watch. I say that because, when I’ve watched him play for Wales under 17s, he’s been a left back charged with taking virtually every corner and attacking free kick his team won with his left foot, I see as well that his short biography on the City website has him down as a left back, but here he played as left sided centreback – Neil Harris and Steve Morison both wanted to sign Jack Simpson presumably because natural left sided centrebacks seem to be like gold dust in the modern game – if Giles can develop in that position, then he might well have a rosy future.
As for the game itself, Crewe soon equalised Pritchard’s very early strike as they made City’s defence look a bit raw and inexperienced for just about the only time in the game as Muhammad Jutta scored easily from close range.
The visitors were always in the game during he first half especially, but City had that bit more quality going forward, although when they regained the lead around the half hour mark, it was down to a mistake as Crole intercepted a poor back pass and set up Ashford for an easy finish from ten yards.
There was another goal before half time as Crewe midfielder Lunt (any relation to their good mmidfielder Kenny Lunt from about twenty years ago I wonder?) was unlucky to see his shot come back off a post, but Jutta was well paced to complete his second simple finish of the game.
City got on top more in the second half. Although our goalkeeper Jake Dennis did superbly to keep out a close range header from a corner, most of the goalmouth action happened at the other end. Pritchard got a second for himself from close range following more fine work from Colwill and the midfielder was at it again when he played sub Japhet Matondo through with ten minutes left to score the game’s decisive goal.
All in all, a very nice way to round the domestic season off – I can’t help thinking that if that game involved the same players representing a different team than Cardiff City, I’d be watching one, maybe two, young lads who would play quite a bit of first team football in the future for the club. The challenge for City, who have found it so hard to convert youthful promise at seventeen and eighteen into first team regular at twenty two and twenty three, is to get it right this time.
Finally, I’d like to thank all readers as well as those who opt to help me with their donations for their support over the course of this season and wish them an enjoyable summer (it must surely start soon mustn’t it?) – in saying that, I’ll be posting pieces on Wales games, at senior and under 17 levels, as well as the usual weekly reviews covering things like general news and transfer speculation at Cardiff City in the coming weeks, so there’ll still be quite a lot to read,
