First subs as midfielders? Turnbull and Kpakio… and only THEN… Alex.

Oh and while I remember… yes it had occurred to me that his daisy-cutter corners were redolent of the training ground… but that is where they should stay. They rely on an air-kicking Ronan (à la Adams Park) to be successful.

No, Tanner showed the way on corners in the last game…high aimed at the penalty spot… particularly with an uncertain keeper like Barnsley’s.

Will sign off now with one final point: you mention in your ‘few thoughts occur to me’… #1… that “I’ll get on Dai’s good side”.

I smile at that. Chwarae teg, boyo. Have I any other? (Joke.)
Dai.

Oh… while I recall, re that pic of me… click on the pic to expand it fully and you will see forefront one of those big desk mats (or whatever they were called) and you will note the logo of my employers, Odeon Cinemas: the depiction of Bombardier Billy Wells hammering that giant Rank Organisation gong.
But why oh why did I not smile? My teeth were pristine white back then… 57 years ago.
DW.

Concerning that first Robertson incident, the Barnsley player ran directly across Robinson’s path (clearly seen when viewed from behind the goal) and secondly he fell by tripping himself up (clearly seen when viewed from the Grandstand camera). That said, this was a difficult decision to arrive at when viewed in real time from the referee’s position.

Thanks for the replies some of which have taken things in a direction which could have hardly have been predicted!

Regarding Robertson’s non red card, I should say that I’m completely biased on two aspects of the modern game, which are pretty closely related, to the extent that logic and reason are excluded when I think about them. The first is the farce which passes for defending dead balls these days – we get the ritual at one of the first corners in the game where the ref pulls a few players aside and lectures them about something, but it can’t be about stopping the wrestling because they all go back to doing exactly what they were before! It’s become ridiculous and devalues the game.

Second, we have the “good foul”, “take one for the team” mentality which first started appearing when you got serial foulers like Robbie Savage in the commentary box. Now it’s rapidly moved on to the stage where fans on podcasts nod sagely as one of their colleagues talk about how so and so committed an “intelligent” foul. The thing that is new here is that the perpetrator of what I grew up calling a professional foul gets praised for fouls which are completely unsubtle and are often caused by them making mistakers in. terms of their position which allows an opponent to get on the “wrong side” of them.

Back in the days of the professional foul, the perpetrator was criticised, not praised and I’m afraid I’ve not grown up when it comes to this subject – I feel the same way about those who commit today’s “take one for the team” fouls as I did the professional foulers of the 80s, they deserve criticism and appropriate punishment, not praise.

To put this into the context of Robertson’s fouls on Tuesday. Maybe Robertson’s first one had some of the subtlety I accuse today’s “good foulers” of lacking. It reminded me of something the All Blacks, and in particular their captain Sean Fitzpatrick, were always getting up to about thirty or forty years ago, when they would raise their hands above their head in a, usually successful, effort to persuade the ref that they were playing no active part in the game, yet they nearly always were as, in reality, what they were doing was plonking themselves right in the line of, say, a scrum half’s desired pass to a fly half. For me, Robertson was doing something similar where he tried to persuade the ref that any collision, if there was any, was accidental, but if his intention was not to stop what might have been a dangerous breakaway at source, he could have taken a slightly different running line which would have meant the ref wouldn’t have had a decision to make.

A few thoughts occur to me now;-

1. I’m sure players are told to commit these “take one for the team” fouls by their managers (I’ll get on Dai’s good side by saying that Pep’s Manchester City side seemed to be trailblazers when it came to these new type of foul, but they were a bit more subtle about it than, say, your average League One footballer is!). Anyway, having been cautioned for one such foul, surely managers tell their players not to give the ref the opportunity to show a second yellow by indulging in the sort of shirt grab that Robertson came up with just outside Barnsley’s penalty area? The commentary on the club video of the game is interesting as they were discussing taking Robertson off in light of his booking even before he committed the second foul and, given that BBM taok him off at Wycombe under similar circumstances, I’m sure our manager doesn’t want his players taking a second one for the team!

2. I would argue therefore that Robertson warranted a second yellow for stupidity as much as anything else. In saying that, I should try to redress the balance by saying that Alex would always be in my first choice starting eleven and I’ll risk Dai’s ire by saying that I’ve come to the conclusion that the low near post corner delivery is a deliberate ploy by City with Calum Chambers the target.

3. Since our relegation, I’d say that the most common answer given by City fans to the question what is the main difference between the Championship and League One would be that the standard of finishing in the former is so much better. Therefore, this prompts a further question – would a club policy where so called good fouls were outlawed inside the opponent’s half be justified? After all, given the level of finishing which prevails in League One the likelihood is you’re not going to concede a goal from this position, so why not just let them go at this level at least?

4. Even at the highest level, the old professional foul was never committed inside the opposition’s half – or perhaps it was, but the players of the time were better at disguising them than the current players are?

Good to see Mike Herbert back in circulation as a MAYA contributor. Mike asks about AMO…

I recall that Mike was a near contemporary of Anthony’s at Pontypridd Grammar School, and it was Mike indeed who told us that Anthony Mor O’Brien’s affectionate nickname was AMO… these were his initials inked on to the front of his school satchel.

This was manna from heaven for me, and the three occasions when we enjoyed the hospitality of he and his dear wife Valerie at their Pwllgwaun home, he and especially Valerie, seemed pleasantly amused by my using this moniker throughout our conversations.

Alas now, I am largely housebound and don’t make my annual visit to my homeland. Sadly it looks like I won’t be able to be back a month from now for an event I would like to attend. My dear sister Marjorie has, on St David’s Day her 90th birthday party at The Rhondda Heritage Centre… or whatever they call the hotel that’s there now at Lewis Merthyr Colliery… the last time I was there was October 1999, when I called on business, and who should I see sitting at the bar… but a boyhood idol*, the great outside half from my hometown, Cliff Morgan. (This was a month before I resigned from my job working for the late great John Anstee and his Glamorgan Brewing Company… left to join my wife Larissa in emigrating (with her job) to the Far East… east of ENGLAND that is…
But I am Daigressing…)

Anyway, I won’t be going down to the homeland… I have only been out of the house twice since Xmas Day… I am still reeling from my bizarre misfuelling nightmare of a few days before Xmas Day, which genuinely has made me think I am going gaga.

And here we come to AMO’s state of health: it is not for me to play ‘doctor’ here or disclose info AMO has given me in emails… but I am sure AMO won’t mind me saying that he and I have similar demands being made on our powers of memory.

But compared to me, he is commendably slim. Alas I am still bearing evidence of flesh wounds incurred at Blundell Park on 2nd March 2024 sitting in the oldest stand in the country which was designed and built while the Boer War was still being fought… and has terraces designed for only the slimmest people to STAND… let alone sit. And following The Taylor Report, they just fitted seats on those same none-too-deep terraces. Nobody ever imagined the possibility of ‘beached whales’ like me one day sitting in seats there with literally NOWHERE to put your legs… well it made a Ryanair seat seem – by comparison – like a back-row of the stalls ‘love seat’, as we used to call them in my days as a relief cinema manager for the Rank Organisation and their Odeon chain.

Let me Daigress with a 100% true story that may be of interest.

Alas, unlike one cinema manager colleague, I was never handed a pair of discarded knickers by the lady cleaners the following morning… though I did once – when relief manager at the Odeon Northampton for a 2 month spell in 1968 – get a call first thing one Saturday morning from a girl who claimed she was a prefect at Northampton Grammar School. She rang me in some distress saying her boyfriend had got carried away the previous night and removed her knickers to the floor with the passionate movement of his hands/feet. She added that she needed her knickers finding by the cleaners as they had her name tape sewn into the waistband of the inside of her blue/green/red? serge pants – forgive me but I cannot remember the finer points of this incident occurring well over half a century ago – and if they got back to her headmistress, she would ensure the girl had ‘six of the best’ inflicted on her rear end ‘sans culottes’…!! (Pun intentional… though perhaps the vast number of teenage pregnancies in the Swinging Sixties is proof-positive that such sexual abandon was far-from-‘revolutionary’ and thus that fact makes the pun a tad ineffective).

Anyway, you get the gist of her message: she said she’d be stretched out over the desk in her Head’s study.

Gosh I was a gullible young fellow… my mouth was suddenly dry and I was swallowing hard… hanging on her every word and instantly promised I would personally lead a search party as soon as this conversation ended… and we would leave no stone unturned (or should that be ‘no pair of panties’ unturned?)

But when I asked for her number to phone her back with news… there was a pregnant pause, and then she started to laugh… and I heard females laughing in the background.

I’d been ‘had’… she and her school (?) friends had done me like a kipper.

Oh… happy days.

Now, a couple of other points. First, thanks dear Steve for the coining of the said DWAS acronym: I would easily run the organisation myself as there’d be almost zero correspondence as I’d be hard-pressed to get many members… but you must remember that I already have my work cut out as a founder member of the King Herod Appreciation Society (Grimsby, NE Lincolnshire branch) formed when twice in 2012, flying home through the night from America, I was stopped from sleeping by non-stop caterwauling infants all the way. ‘Twas then I became a Founder Member of The King Herod Appreciation Society (Grimsby, NE Lincolnshire branch.)…

*he was one of two heroes from my hometown… the other was that deeply serious writer of comic novels and plays, Gwyn Thomas… and I should add he was a television essayist and raconteur almost nonpareil. He remains my favourite literary ‘Thomas’… edging out Dylan and R.S… I used to spend hours trying to capture his cadences and marvellous voice box timbre… in my attempts at impersonation (well, it made a change from Anthony Newley and Adam Faith, my party pieces as a kid)…
DW

Ta for your comments. By the way we are looking for a Secretary for the Dai Woosnam Appreciation Society (DWAS). Dai has said, allegedly, that the pay is quite good.

“Sideways and backwards
You know it makes sense.
Sideways and backwards
The way to progress.”

Sorry, Dai.

SP.

Mike Herbert
PS: Any news of my very old mate Anthony O’Brien who used to contribute?

Barnsley were a neat footballing side but lacked any sort of cutting edge in the final third, having scored only 37 goals this season. City, if we are being brutally honest, never had to get out of second gear. In boxing parlance the home team won by jabs. There was no need for the heavy artillery.

The contentious Robertson incidents are interesting. I have read those who have vented their spleen that he should have been sent off (for two yellow cards) and that the ref was a disgrace following the second incident. I’m also interested in his first, indiscretion (?). It came after a foul by Barnsley’s #19 on Ng marginally outside the visitor’s penalty area. That was not given and in the break that followed Robertson was adjudged to have brought down Barnsley’s #22. He fell to earth clutching his head and held it for some time whist he lay motionless on the ground. The ref was pressurised immediately by 3 visiting players and a yellow card was shown. I have great sympathy for the referee on this one. The only problem was Robertson never touched the player. If you play the video of the game from 4:10 to 5:00 (match time) you can clearly see the potential foul on Ng and then Barnsley’s #22 who tripped himself up. In short, Robertson didn’t touch the player. Having said that most humans would have had difficulty in coming to the correct conclusion on that one. [ https://tv.cardiffcityfc.co.uk/videos/browse ]

Concerning the second Robertson incident, in the present climate, VAR would have played it in slow motion, shown a freeze-frame and given the decision all day long. What I didn’t like this time, I believe 6 red-shirted players were in the ref’s ear. As it was there were two incidents: one foul and one yellow card. To have been sent-off for two yellows when the first wasn’t even a foul would have been extremely harsh.
What I’d say of the Willock penalty incident on 46 mins: yes, there was minimal contact. Some are given and some are not. But permit me to broaden the penalty issue. Last season Birmingham, Third Tier champions, were awarded 13 penalties. Now 60% through this season we have been given one. I dare anyone to view a City game and not find far, far worse misdemeanours (misdemeanors / USA) in the box than tonight’s and yet they were not given to the Bluebirds.

Mr Swabey, was certainly nowhere near the worst referee we’ve had this season. In his defence I’d say, unlike so many, he was not pressurised by players. The three incidents / accidents mentioned above are typical of so much that goes on today on the football pitches of the PL and EFL. Referees do have a hard job of it but of numerous fouls given to day I wonder how many grannies would have hit the deck during the January sales in Mothercare, under some of this sort of contact?

Finally to City. It was a pleasing performance which could been more than 4-0. Certainly Robinson deserved a goal during his substitute appearance. Kellyman played well and scored another good goal, but why (and yes I’ve said this before) is there all this star-fish nonsense by keepers, consequently then having to stick a leg out to try and stop the ball. Had he stood up and simply dived to his right he’d have easily saved goal number three.

Anyway 4-0 is 4-0.