I’m pretty sure we saw a career first today for Cardiff City midfielder Manolis Siopis in the home match with league leaders Sheffield United as he provided a hundred per cent of the on target goal attempts from both teams in the opening forty five minutes.
I suppose many of you who didn’t watch the match probably muttered something like “there must have only been one of them then” when you read the above paragraph and you’d be right. The Greek international showed decent technique to get his volley from about twenty five yards on target, but accuracy without power was never going to trouble goalkeeper Michael Cooper.
Still, it was more than the best Championship team currently could manage and, being realistic when you consider the league table and the relative form of the two sides, an incident free and goalless opening forty five minutes represented a pretty good outcome for the home team.
The plan from City was clearly to frustrate the team with eight wins in their last ten matches and hope to nick a goal from somewhere.
Bulutball was making a comeback and, to be fair, for more than an hour what City produc ed was much better than what was on offer in our previous two home games. However, whereas our previous manager had the division’s best set piece attack to fall back on last season, we are no better than average in that department this time around and so, when you consider that we were up against the Championship’s second best defence with what is now, officially, the Championship’s worst attack, you’d couldn’t help thinking that the only score line by which we could avoid defeat was 0-0.
Instead of that, Sheffield gradually upped their attacking game and Keiffer Moore showed that, as he enters the New Year shortly in his thirty third year, he may well be the best striker of his type in the division with two high quality goals of a type that prove he is more than just a target man.
By contrast, in the biggest indictment of the club’s haphazard recruitment in 2024, all City can offer in the striking department are a series of players who all have faults in their game which mark them down as below average in important facets of the modern striker’s game.
Wilfried Kanga is, well, what can you say? Yakou Meite is I believe having his best spell of form since he signed for us and is a very willing runner, but has technical limitations and is not a great finisher, Callum Robinson has the technique and is probably the best finisher at the club, but questions have emerged in the last year about his fitness and mobility as he struggles with a chronic injury. There’s also Michael Reindorf who has done so well to put himself into first team contention with his consistent goal scoring at under 21 level, but, truth be told, he’s has looked what he is in his appearances so far – a promising,, but raw novice who is, ridiculously, being promoted in some places as the answer to our striking problems – anyway, Reindorf’s joined the queue of players trying to gain access to the badly overcrowded Cardiff City treatment room in the last few days.
Two regulars in that treatment room in recent times, Kion Etete and Isaak Davies will perhaps be available to increase competition in the striking department quite soon. The former began another comeback after his aborted first one about a month ago with forty five minutes in the under 21s 3-1 win over Watford in the Premier League Cup on Thursday and the latter has just started stepping up his training following a setback about six weeks ago.
Even if they were to both come back on schedule and quickly move into first team contention, neither Etete or Davies have a good scoring record for the senior team, with the ex Spurs man’s “body language” being questioned at times and there will be questions as to whether persistent hamstring problems mean that Davies will be able to provide the attacking speed we so clearly lack.
All of this means that, as we’re now the only team in the Championship with less than twenty goals to our name, we surely need to add at least one good finisher to our ranks in January if we are to avoid relegation.
That may sound overly dramatic, but I believe we’re now at that stage. Weve needed a good striker throughout 2024 and, through two transfer windows have failed ignominiously to bring one on. However, in January last year, we had a big enough buffer to get away with our failure in their striker recruitment stakes and through the summer, it could be claimed that the problem could be sorted out in January, well, now it absolutely has to be.
Even if we do actually get the striker recruitment right this time, he will be coming into a team that creates very little. Injuries don’t help here. For example, Chris Willock was following up his good showing at Stoke with what might have been a better display here, but he picked up what looked like a groin injury early in the second half and im afraid his replacement Rubin Colwill is looking a shadow of the man who was a nominee for Championship player of the month in October.
Colwill had what I would rate as our best chance of the afternoon soon after he came on – granted, it was a difficult ball to catch cleanly and it came to him on his left foot, but a confident and in form Colwill would have at least hit the target, here though he blazed his shot well over the bar.
The best City could offer were well struck shots from outside the penalty area by Meite and Robinson that drew saves from Cooper that he would expect to make ninety nine per cent of the time and a decent effort from distance by Anwar El Ghazi which flew not too far wide.
How City must have wished they had the man who was supposed to be signing for us around this time last year back in our ranks again. Sheffield had worked Jak Alnwick a couple of times after the break, but City were still pretty comfortable at 0-0 as the game moved towards its final quarter, until Moore came into his own.
The big striker outmuscled Jesper Daland when challenging for a cross and then brought the ball down before producing a high quality instant finish into the top corner from fifteen yards. If Daland could argue tpo some extent that it was more Moore’s ability than any mistake by him that was responsible for the first goal, it was his error which led to the second one as his pass was intercepted and Moore was able to move forward ten yards and place a precise shot past Alnwick on his near post. Having seen replays of the goal, I think that Moore deserves to be credited for the accuracy of his shot, but there has to be a question about Alnwick’s part in the goal.
Most interest in the final stages came from a brief but encouraging showing as subs by Cian Ashford and Ronan Kpakio on his league debut – the seventeen year old showed few nerves, was prepared to get into forward areas and I feel he looks more at home in those advanced areas than either of the other right back candidates Perry Ng or Andy Rinomhota.
For what must be the first time in ages for a league game, City had two subs who were still eligible for our under 18 team, as Troy Perrett, who only reached eighteen in October, was an unused substitute.
Perrett probably owed his promotion to his good showing for the under 21s in the game with Watford on Thursday that I mentioned earlier. Omer Riza was watching as City moved into a position whereby a win against Everton in their final game would see us win our qualifying group.
It was another entertaining and enjoyable performance by the youngsters as Isaac Jeffries, sub Morgan Wigley, with what I believe was his first kick, and my pick as man of the match, Mannie Barton got the goals in what was a comfortable win.
I’ll finish with some random thoughts on why I’m increasingly coming around to thinking we’re going down this season. First, we’ve now lost seven home games with eleven of our twenty three fixtures played (strangely six of them have been by 2-0) and that’s an appalling record which, even with as little as three home losses through the rest of the campaign, will leave us with a home record that you’d expect from a relegation candidate.
Second, although it’s hard to keep track, I believe we have ten players with first team experience unavailable through injury and an eleventh went off injured today. Is it just bad luck that we’re getting so many injuries or is there more to it than that? Is there the same reluctance to bring in medical staff by those running the club as there is to bring in coaching staff to get our numbers up to the sort of levels seen at most other clubs in the division?
Thirdly, why is Omer Riza so reluctant to pick Will Fish? I think I’m right in saying Fish played about thirty five minutes in Riza’s first game in charge and has not been seen since. It’s the sort of thing which again raises questions about the lack of a Director of Football at the club because there appears to be little in the way of coordination between the manager and recruitment team (eg the signing of Roco Simic where Erol Bulut clearly knew very ;ittle about the player).
