There’s been plenty of talk in what is almost a third of a season now about how poor the standard is in League One. I’d agree to the extent that we’ve seen quite a few pretty straightforward chances missed by opposition forwards – opportunities that you feel would be taken in the Championship.
However, I reckon Port Vale, Stockport, Leyton Orient, Reading and Bolton off the top of my head have all been impressive in their different ways at various stages of their matches with us.
More evidence that this is not a division to be underestimated was provided by a Blackpool team that was in the bottom four today, yet City could have been traveling home tonight on the end of a five or six goal hammering, rather than the sobering 3-1 loss they suffered.
I thought Blackpool were very good, they were direct and physical when required and yet all of their goals came from swift counter attacks – albeit helped by naive and ineffective defending. Defensively, they relied on goalkeeper Bailey Peacock-Farrell to a large extent, but they also did well to nullify City efforts to play through the middle while also dealing well enough with City crosses when they came in.
When you consider the number of one on ones the home side missed in the second half, there can be no doubting that they were deserved winners, yet this was a very odd game in some respects.
If I had a concern about City so far this season it was how in too many games we were rendered almost completely impotent in terms of goal scoring – e’g. Port Vale, Wimbledon, Stockport, Bolton and Peterborough.
For all that we were impressive in winning at Wrexham, we were in “wouldn’t have scored if they were still scoring now” mode in the two 1-0 losses either side of that game – it wasn’t like that today though.
The BBC stats (especially the attacking ones) make for remarkable reading
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/live/c3w97w02n1xt#MatchStats
Forty seven touches in the opposition penalty area, twenty eight goal attempts, eleven on target. We didn’t labour away to no attacking effect today.
In fact, for about twenty five minutes we were very impressive with all of the youngsters in the team showing why they’ve created such a positive impression this season – Kpakio, Lawlor, Joel Colwill and Ashford all had their very good moments, while Joel Bagan was influential down the left, Alex Robertson showed he can be a more than decent number six at this level and Rubin Colwill was “running the game” for a spell.
City put together some lovely, fluent, moves during this time with the older Colwill, twice, Joel, Kpakio and Omari Kellyman all being foiled by Peacock-Farrell who would also deny Robertson and Yousef Salech after the break.
Calum Chambers also missed with a header from within the six yard box at 1-0 down. It was a bad miss, but although many of Peacock-Farrell’s saves were good ones, i wouldn’t say any of them were stunners and so you have to think that some of the multitude of chances we had should have been taken – the keeper should not have been given the opportunity to make some of his saves.
City started with a back four which included Lawlor and Chambers at centreback, Robertson was behind the Colwill brothers, with Kellyman and Ashford supporting Salech.
The aforementioned centrebacks were given an early examination that they only just passed as they defended long balls forward with a high line that the home front two of Tom Bloxham and Ashley Fletcher looked to exploit with their physicality.
With a very aggressive pressing game, Blackpool should have been front in three minutes when Chambers struggled to deal with Peacock-Farrell’s punt and the ball fell to CJ Hamilton who should have done better than stab into the side netting.
City continued to struggle with Blackpool’s directness as the home side really went for it in the opening stages.
City rode their luck and kept it at 0-0 until Blackpool’s energy began to wane – as it had to. For the rest of the first half, City looked likely scorers of the game’s first goal, but the final five minutes saw a bit of a Blackpool revival during which Bloxham volleyed against a post from twenty yards.
It had been a breathless and very enjoyable first half with the mystery being how on earth it remained goalless, but, the second half saw one of the teams get on top and I’m afraid it wasn’t us!
The deadlock was broken just two minutes into the second half when Blackpool rather luckily played through City’s press and a single pass released Fletcher who had a run in on goal from the half way line. Great things were expected from Fletcher as a youngster , but he’s been something of an enigma as his career has been played out mostly at lower end Championship level it seems. Now, at 31, he finds himself at the bottom end of League One, but here he showed signs of the ability which had some predicting great things for him more than a decade ago as he buried his shot beyond Nathan Trott on his near post – although you do have to wonder why Lawlor did not try to force him wider.
City pushed for an equaliser, but their earlier attacking fluency had disappeared and BBM’s substitutions didn’t work. In fact, all they did really was make us more vulnerable to counter attacks, as we proved on plenty of occasions in the game’s final quarter as the ball was lost in all sorts of dangerous positions.
Substitute Emil Harrison provided the defence splitting pass on sixty nine minutes for the home team’s second goal as Fletcher nonchalantly clipped his shot over Trott.
What followed was concerning as City were continually opened up as they chased the game – this will happen under such circumstances of course, but it all looked very naive by City to me.
Callum Robinson, on as a sub, was dispossessed on the edge of the Blackpool penalty area in the eighty first minute and seconds later the ball was in our net as Bloxham made it three from fifteen yards.
I’ve not even mentioned yet that Bobby Madley was ref. He was his usual self with plenty of strange decisions against us, but he was an incidental figure here who played little part in the outcome of the game.
Madley was as harsh in his handling of Salleck as any of the League One refs this season, but there was a small reward for the striker deep into added time when Peacock-Farrell spilled Ashford’s shot into his path and he scored from five yards. However, for all that he gets little or no protection from the officials, I thought Bloxham, who cost millions less than Salleck, looked much the better striker today.
In fact, that could be said about so many of the players on the pitch today – the ones in blue may have had the bigger reputation, but the ones in tangerine were the more effective.u
At other levels, two early Millwall goals did for the under 18s at Leckwith this lunchtime – they were two down in fifteen minutes and suffered a rare loss despite Jack Sykes getting one back.
Thanks Paul, as ever…
What’s the betting that Salech wants to be sold in the January window… to any club where a manager will play him Sheringham/Cole style with a mate up front and two direct wingers.
Ian Evatt is a proper sensible manager, and thus his Blackpool played two men up front – Fletcher and Bloxham – and took them off with the game easily won in the 88th and 89th minutes.
As for BBM… he is a one trick tiki-taka pony. And a deliberately perverse one at that, in that he persists in thinking that Calum Chambers is a centre back, when in reality he is a constant liability there.
I have come to the conclusion that BBM is a man who does not learn from history… or more to the point, he’s a man both ignorant of and OBLIVIOUS to history.
Had he studied Cardiff’s performances of early last season with Chambers disastrous at the back, he’d know to only play him in midfield… especially with a fit Fish on the bench.
But the real man to play in midfield yesterday (instead of the always underwhelming Alex Robertson) was the man who the egregious Mick McCarthy bizarrely loaned to Blackpool just after signing him… and he spent the months of October to December there, becoming a fans favourite at Bloomfield Road, before we recalled him from his loan on 3rd January 2022, having sacked the MM/TC bandits, and seen them disappear with their undeserved loot over the horizon.
He won a few MotM awards in his 18 appearances for the Seasiders, and was lauded by their then manager Neil Critchley…
https://tinyurl.com/3dr7mbj7
He had admirers throughout the West Midlands…
https://tinyurl.com/4rsz9a26
Yet, I will wager with you that BBM had no idea that if he’d played him from the start, given Ryan’s desire to strut his stuff on his old stamping* ground, he’d have played a stormer.
So, he was kept on the bench unused. Were BBM an officer in the Armed Forces, he’d now be up ‘on a charge’ for such dereliction of duty.
And a final point…
… yes our shooting was pitiful yesterday, but one of the points I recently made was proved emphatically with Salech’s goal… viz… that if you shoot straight at a goalkeeper, even the best will fumble a save and present you with a goal.
Keep shooting, boys… and let’s hope for a Damascene conversion in the thinking of BBM.
*excuse me using the original British spelling, and not the much more popular more modern American spelling of ‘stomping’…
TTFN,
Dai.
Glad you’re well enough, Paul, to write the MAYA article that so many of us look forward to and need. And this time you are kinder and more sympathetic than many of us who were following what was happening in Blackpool. You do say that all Blackpool’s goals were scored following “naive and ineffective defending” on our part, yes, but also you do welcome our “attacking fluency” .. and indeed, it did seem that our team had been told that most goals are scored from shots in the other team’s penalty area, but when I looked at the statistics what mattered most for me was that although having throughout well over 60% possession it took us until the 8th minute of added time to score a goal! So agaiu I want training sessions to have all players practising SHOOTING!
Hi Paul.
Sorry, didn’t realise you had been in hospital – just thought you were being unusually quiet! Anyway, really sorry to hear, but glad you have a planned way forward and good luck with the future treatment. Fingers crossed.
Sadly, performances on the pitch over the last month – Wrexham an honourable exception – won’t have helped your mood.
I agree, with you that at the moment I am not quite sure what to make of our team or manager. So capable, at times, of playing outstanding football, but equally frustrating with our inconsistency and vulnerability to more direct opponents. Additionally, the possession stats are messing with our expectations as we are content to move the ball side to side with no penetration and little by way of accurate balls for our main man up front.
I have only seen brief highlights from yesterday, although appears they did not reflect our first half superiority. However, the goals had a similar look of our defenders being naive and getting done of the turnover. Looked a bit like the Bradford home game as we were taken apart by swift counter-attacking.
Another flat performance going into an international break – a familiar occurrence.
Also suffering from this being a strange month of league football with no chance to get into a rhythm with the cup fixtures being a distraction. By the time we play Mansfield it will be 6 weeks since the last home league game by my calculation. Given that our flying start to the season was based upon some impressive home performances with the home crowd really getting behind our new team and manager, that does feel a long time to get a chance to recapture that momentum.
But, keeping positive and still got a game in hand and fixtures thick and fast in December to sort things out. Just need our manager to learn the lessons that we enthusiasts can see and opponent managers are currently taking advantage of.
Cheers.
Paul and comrades,
Still waiting for my comments on the gloomy City performance (some might say it was the antithesis of Blackpool’s Illuminations) to receive moderation… although I sent it before Sunday lunchtime.
At the time of writing this (is going on for 4.10am on Monday), and as my sleep apnoea is playing its tricks on me, and not letting me go back to sleep for the last hour, I thought I would take refuge in a team who are even worse than us… they are bottom of our division.
So I’ve just been watching the 33 year old Pie. He never fails to cheer me up. Were Geoffrey Chaucer to be alive today, he’d say his disparate group of Pilgrims – drawn from different strata of society but all bound in a common cause – had abandoned Canterbury as their destination and switched to Huddersfield.
Utterly absorbing. And if you needed the analogy made more convincing, guess what these supporters are called… they are called The Pilgrims*…!!
https://tinyurl.com/3ctwvd2k
*interestingly it is a nickname they share with Boston United. Why Boston? Well, because the 102 passengers on the Mayflower contained the original Pilgrims from 1608 who were Lincolnshire and east Nottinghamshire non-conformist folk who had sailed to Leiden in the Netherlands from Immingham Creek, just 7 miles from me here in Grimsby (where I have lived the last 26 years) but they had returned for various reasons a decade later… inability to be fluent in Dutch being a significant factor.
And they had also heard that land was being offered them in the New World: land where they could practise their religion.
Queen Elizabeth I, had allowed Protestant non-conformist religious beliefs to flourish in England. But things radically changed on her death.
And I quote historian Ben Doyle
‘One such non-conformist belief was that of the Separatists, a group of Puritans with strong Lincolnshire links: Gainsborough was at the heart of the Lincolnshire Separatist movement, while another group was based just over the border at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire.
Separatists wanted the freedom to worship God away from the constraints of the Church of England. When Elizabeth was succeeded by King James I in 1603, there was a clampdown on such groups – it became illegal not to attend church and the Separatist Movement was banned a year later.’
(Hope you are still with me…)
So, dear MAYA readers, they hired a small ship called the Speedwell which they set sail in from the Lincolnshire town of Boston to meet up with a few other non-conformist emigrants, in Southampton. The plan was that they too would board the Speedwell, and all travel on it to the New World together. In Southampton they would join up with a larger ship (the celebrated Mayflower)… which was the ship that would carry all their extensive food and drink provisions, equipment for building a settlement, and surviving in a potentially harsh climate, animals, plants, et cetera.
It was not planned that the Mayflower carried passengers… but it eventually has to take all Speedwell’s passengers when the latter started taking in water off the South West coast, and had to put into Plymouth for emergency repairs… where it was deemed unseaworthy.
So it was that the two ships then became one, and the Mayflower and Plymouth stole Lincolnshire’s fame.
And the sad joke is that no Plymouth folk were on the Mayflower…!! Yet the town took the name for their Argyll’s fans.
Oh, you might think ‘the cheek of it’…!! And yet this fine band of men making their weekly pilgrimages to follow their team, have proved themselves totally worthy of the name.
My particular favourites are Pie, Sam and Kipper. Let me wish them what folk wished the sailing ship the Maylower as it put out of Plymouth in 1620… ‘Fair winds and following seas’… and let me add, a safe harbour come next May in a place above the dreaded ‘drop’.
TTFN,
Dai.
As ever, thank-you Paul for your comments on Saturday’s game. They were greatfully received. But even more importantly I’m pleased to learn of your discharge from hospital and trusting you’ll make a full recovery.
Following the game at Blackpool the question, “Where do we go from here?” comes to mind.
Over the initial weeks of this new season my recurring thought has been that Cardiff City and BB-M are the Third Division equivalent of Man Utd and Ruben Amorim viz an underperforming team and a manager who has only one formation. Ok, Amorim is stuck to 3421 and whilst BB-M is wedded to 4231 both teams have been hamstrung, to some degree, by their manager’s unchanging credo. Ange Postecoglou and Russell Martin are two more of this ilk, who have had repeated sackings, before getting a tune of their charges.
Even at Cardiff Sunday League level, Arthur, the manager of Roath Park Athletic, always said: “You see who you have and play a system that suits them.” How can the logic of this eminently sensible approach to football be lost on some in the professional game?
After the first dozen games it seems we’ve been found out. That so many Third Division outfits have not only negated City this season but posed serious problems is concerning. And yet, it seems, City are set up to play 4231 come what may. Numerous opposition teams have packed midfield, got in our faces and that has been it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Why at Third Division level is there a need for seven players in defensive positions? Even when opposition teams play with a sweeper we still only have Salech up front. Why? We give the other team so much respect and also minimise our attacking threat.
Colwill infuriates: a player of great talent but one who often flatters to deceive. If he had less talent his shortcomings would be less of an issue.
Moreover, the need for experienced old heads is still evident at this level. Is BB-M naiive or stubborn? Will he be more flexible in the games ahead?
I started this post by quoting the title of a song written by Robbie Robertson (of The Band) from the album called, ‘Cahoots,’ (1971). One website stated that the song was, “… reflective and introspective … that [focused] on the challenges of modern times and the question of what the future holds.”
On that same album is a song titled, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece.’ It has a line that goes:
“Someday everything is gonna sound like a rhapsody;
When I paint my masterpiece.”
I do hope that come May 2026 those words will apply to BB-M’s Cardiff City. Funnily enough Dai, the term, ‘a one trick pony,’ is one I was toying with using in this post before reading it in your’s. I’m hoping against hope, that BB-M is not that and the present hiatus is redeemable by a more pragmatic approach.
By a beautiful serendipitous coincidence, I have just read Steve’s words having just started on putting to bed my latest newsletter, which I aim to send out to folk on my (always free) mailing list in the next 24 hours or so.
And in it I include an item where I cite the opening line of Robert Allen Zimmerman’s WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE as being just about unbeatable.
And now I have just read Steve’s reference to that great song, and the version on that fine 1971 album from The Band.
Am I a hypocrite calling it a fine album? After all, 18 year old me was one of the many attendees at the Bob Dylan gig at The Capitol Theatre on May 11th, 1966 who leapt to their feet when Dylan came out for the second half – having dispensed with his Martin acoustic guitar and now strapped on a Fender Stratocaster – with some infernal noisy backing musicians: a Toronto-based outfit apparently called The Hawks…!!
Oh, how we booed and catcalled throughout the remaining 35-40 minutes or so.
One is embarrassed now to even think about it. Such philistines we were… Neanderthals indeed.* And here’s for why… within a month of that concert, Dylan had surrounded himself with a new electric backing band called The Band…
… except it was not a ‘new’ band at all, since the core members merely had ‘transitioned’ as it were, from The Hawks to The Band… viz…Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson.
(Appropriate that Helm and Danko’s hames are together there, since they now lie within a few feet of each other in their graves in Woodstock Cemetery in The Catskills.)
And in the 5 years that elapsed between that memorable Cardiff brouhaha of a concert, to the release of their Cahoots album, I had re-educated myself, and become a fan.
But one thing I will never forgive Helm for… his desecration of the second best line of the song. Dylan’s lyrics originally were…
‘…
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.
…’
This fabulous image got changed by Levon to ‘got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece’… and soon Dylan himself was singing such a lacklustre line in concert with them.
But God bless The Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir always remained true to the original ‘Botticelli’ line in the subsequent years.
Oh dear… I am getting carried away…
Will sign off now.
How I hope the rumours are true that BBM will be going ‘down by The Riverside’… where he can study warlike football no more… but instead play his pretty 4-2-3-1 football which Steve Gibson will no doubt believe is the ‘modern progressive way’.
Dream on, Dai boyo, dream on.
*And yes, don’t worry… I am bright enough to know that my 1966 misjudgement could similarly come back and bite me on my April (Cockney for aris… = April in Paris), when it comes to BBM.
But methinks the trees will be full of gammon before that happens. BBM is no Robbie Robertson… (RIP Robbie, and sorry I booed ya and shouted ‘get off the stage you vandals!’
TTFN,
Dai.
PS … I should have added the full chain re ‘aris’… viz… aris comes from Aristotle, which in turn comes from bottle, and ‘bottle and glass’ rhymes with the 4 letter word that Americans spell with just 3.
In 1969, I was assistant manager at the long demolished Odeon Mile End, and got a good grounding from our doorman in Cockney Rhyming Slang as Bow Bells was just a mile away.
Funny how some things stick in the brain for over half a century… yet I have forgotten what that splendid doorman was called and even his facial features…!!
Oh and I note that I did not close those final brackets. Apols. Hoping to have my broken parentheses and otiose exclamation marks painlessly removed in hospital soon.
TTFN,
Dai.
Thanks all for your replies. Rather than address them all individually, I’ll come back with a few thoughts of my own, the first of which is to express a sense of bafflemnet by the current team. Yes, I take on board the usual caveat about young sides and their inconsistency, but I cannot get my head around how what are arguably our two best performances this season have come on the grounds of sides from higher divisions – they create a rod for their own back because they show that they are capable of performances which would see them establish themselves as a mid table Championship side, if not better. However, they’ve not produced a convincing league showing which goes close to matching ehat we saw at Burnley and Wrexham since we won at Wigan.
Steve talks of systems, but on Saturday we conceded the second goal as soon as we switched to 4-4-2 (although, to be fair, the switch to that system has worked in a couple of home games recently) and I’m unconvinced that the system is the problem. I’m in the give two strikers a go camp, but am not comnfident it will work because unlese, we switch to a 3-5-2/5-3-2, we’ll be overrun in midfield. Where I agree with Steve though is that whatever wystem we use, we need seven players who have defined defensive responsibilities – in essence we play with seven defenders and four attackers.
Thinking about it, I keep on returning to what I have felt has been a problem with City from day one of the season (in fact it’s been a problem for ages), we don’t create enough and if we do put something together, all it does is show our finishing deficiencis. Actually, I’ll qualify that first bit to say there have been signs that our creativity is improving this season. Saturday showed that you cannot say we lack creativity full stop, but, all that the good football of the first half did was higlight our finishing problems.
The defensive implosiion. on Saturday was shocking, but, given further time to reflect on it, I think it’s something that can be sorted out with hard work on the training pitch and the acquiring of experience for our younger defenders.
To those who say BBM has no plan B, I’d say he’s often changed fomrations during games, with mixed outcomes – if I’ve got an issue with him, it’s his insistence on rotating centrebacks. For me, it’s reasonable to ask if Saturday’s defensive horror show would have happened if there had been consistent selection at centreback?
Huw brings up the imbalance between our fixtures in terms of us having had a run of predominantly home games followed by a run of continuous away matches. It may be a factor in what has happened in recent weeks, but I’m not fully convinced as we seem like one of those sides where performance isn’t determined by where they’re playing = although i would say that our better performances this season have come in away games.
FinaLLY, a word to Dai – although I entirely concede the point that it happens very, very rarely, when a goal like Man City’s opener on Sunday gets scored, it goes quite some way to justifying the Pep Guardiola philosophy – what a goal that was!