League One’s top scorers, but they look so short of attacking options currently.

For twenty minutes tonight it looked like Plymouth 5 Cardiff 2 and Cardiff 0 Lincoln 2 had never happened. City were playing Barnsley off the park, they’d scored a really nice goal and the home side looked like they were going to take a beating to match the one they suffered at Cardiff City Stadium around six weeks ago.

However, out of nowhere, Barnsley came up with an equaliser which owed much to poor defending and we were never the same again. There was no more scoring after that and while a draw is not the disaster that some on the message board I use seem to think it is, we drop four points behind Lincoln who won 1-0 at Exeter and, currently, a single goal away win looks like something that is beyond us. 

If a draw isn’t a terrible outcome, our performance in gaining it is concerning for a couple of reasons – firstly, the quality is just not there at the moment and, secondly, too many of our players are off form. Regarding the latter, some of our experienced performers (eg Calum Chambers and Chris Willock) have let their standards slip recently and Perry Ng was some way below the fine form he had been showing in the first half tonight especially and he has to carry some of the responsibility for the goal we let in – was he fully recovered from the illness which kept him out on the weekend?

Just like Saturday, it was hard to single out players who had a good game – Dylan Lawlor showed just how important he is to us through much of the first half, but, perhaps troubled by the hamstring issue that has limited his football since the turn of the year, he had his problems with the evergreen David McGoldrick after the break. I thought Calum Scanlon showed up well going forward down the left in his first start for the club – he certainly has pace and although he lost the ball cheaply in the build up to the Barnsley goal, he didn’t do too badly defensively.

Apart from that though, there were good moments from most of our players (for example, from three of them for our goal), but that’s all they were, moments. 

I can feel myself going into negative mode here, so I should say that, while not at our best, we forced Barnsley back continuously in the second half, won a stack of corners and the fact that goalkeeper Owen Goodman was named as Barnsley’s man of the match tells a bit of a story.

To be honest, Barnsley were set up like an away team for most of the game as they sat back and let us have a lot of the ball. For a second straight game, we had seventy per cent plus possession (73/27 this time), but again, we didn’t do a great deal with it.

Rather like against Lincoln, your cause isn’t helped if you don’t have an aerial presence in the penalty area when you have a crossing opportunity from open play and it seems clear that there is an acceptance that the aerial cross is a bit pointless with the forward players we have available to us currently. By the same token, all of those corners I mentioned were not as useful as they might have been because even with our central defenders and Ng forward, we don’t have much of an aerial presence and so we are reliant on things like low crosses and short corners – it’s as if we don’t believe we can score from high crosses without Yousef Salech and maybe they’re right to think that.

Furthermore, both of the players we’ve used to lead the attack, or to play as a false nine at least, lately have had time out with injuries and neither of them look like they are fully up to match speed yet. For the second straight game, Omari Kellyman lasted less than seventy minutes, yet it would have been unthinkable to have seen him withdrawn with us not in a winning position, such was his form before the groin issue which saw him miss the Doncaster game.

On the other hand, Rubin Colwill has played the full ninety minutes against Lincoln and Barnsley, but he’s coming back after three months out and his form has been like a Curate’s Egg – good in parts, but also rusty in parts with a tendency to become careless with his passing.

So, daft as it may sound for the division’s leading scorers, we look a bit powder puff going forward at the moment – we’re seemingly restricted in the sort of service we can provide when crossing and the limitations of the false nine system, which worked so well for a while in Salech’s absence, is being exposed with the patchy form of the players chosen to fill the role not helping.

I’ve said once or twice on here that setting out to play in the manner BBM has wanted this season cannot be easy for what are only League One players after all and, in recent weeks, playing with a false number only adds to that feeling – credit to the players for managing so well for most of the season, but it’s looking hard work for them currently.

It wasn’t as if we weren’t getting shots in mind, Ollie Tanner maybe should have done more with a cross from Scanlon’s most impressive piece of play of the evening and the winger had a deflected shot turned aside by Goodman who also saved well from Rubin Colwill; and sub Cian Ashford in the second half, while another sub, David Turnbull crashed a twenty five yard shot not too far wide.

There was also an odd incident when Kellyman was clearly fouled as the ball was being cleared out of the Barnsley penalty area, but, after a delay when I began to think we might actually be awarded a penalty, referee Will Finnie (who I thought was pretty good otherwise) opted to restart the game with a free kick to Barnsley!

The home side will claim that they could have won it as well. Apart from their goal, Barnsley’s only attacking threat came from the 38 year old McGoldrick who got the better of Lawlor twice in the second half but could only send an attempted lob over the bar and then fire straight at Nathan Trott from the edge of the penalty area. However, McGoldrick was guilty of missing the game’s best chance which came in Barnsley’s dominant second quarter of the game when he blazed over the bar from ten yards out with no City player anywhere near him.

City’s goal was another beauty which saw Lawlor hitting an accurate pass out from the back, Alex Robertson switching play with a glorious cross field ball to Tanner and then the winger pulling back a neat low cross similar to the one he played to Kellyman for his goal at Rotherham – this time it was to Colwill who finished confidently with a low first time shot past Goodman from around the penalty spot.

Barnsley’s leveler saw Scanlon out of position after losing the ball, so there was plenty of room for them to attack down our left and Tom Bradshaw picked out Scott Banks on the far post who was left in total isolation to shoot past Trott from ten yards. Banks’ task was made a lot easier by Ng being drawn towards McGoldrick on the near post who was being marked by Ryan Wintle I think it was, so it was hard to see why our right back reacted like he did. It was another soft goal to concede and I’m afraid that spell during January and February when we were defending really well seems a long time away now.

The McGoldrick miss I mentioned earlier was very similar to the Barnsley goal as a home player was left to run down the right wing and cross low to the far post, this time though it was two onto one in the home team’s favour as Lawlor went with Bradshaw leaving McGoldrick totally free – Chambers and Ng only appeared in the picture seconds after the shot had cleared the bar, so I’ve not got a clue as to what was going on with the two of them.

So that’s our game in hand on Bolton gone and we’re now nine points in front of them with ten to play and a better goal difference – Bradford will also be nine behind if they win their game in hand at Port Vale tomorrow.

There was a very competitive game between two evenly matched teams at Cardiff City Stadium this afternoon where our under 21s came out on top by 1-0 against Charlton. A dull first half was followed by a much better second period and Charlton will I’m sure think they were unlucky to lose – that said, we defended better and better as the game went on with Alyas Debono in particular excelling. The decisive moment came early in the second half when a neat flick by Jake Davies, who rivalled Debono for the Man of the match award in my view, set up Mannie Barton whose shot from fifteen yards got a pretty big deflection to find the corner of the net.