I suppose that if the opposition are quicker, stronger, more skillful and want it more than you it should come as no surprise that you end up losing 3-0, like Cardiff City did at Hull this afternoon. However, it still was a shock to see City so comprehensively outplayed as their slump, both in terms of results and performances, continued. Hull were impressive today and could have doubled their score with a bit more precision in their finishing. It would be easy to conclude therefore that they were a likely top six finisher after watching them today, but were they really that good or was it a case of us being that bad?
Sadly, I tend to think it was more the latter. To be honest, I was more impressed by Southampton in their 2-0 win over us a fortnight ago than I was by Hull today.
If I’m being honest, it was hard to get too excited about being sixth in the table like we have been at various times during the autumn because I always believed we needed to have a brilliant January window to be able to maintain an interest in the Play Offs through to May, but, by the same token, getting to thirty points well before Christmas was a sign of definite progress being made after two very bad seasons.
Unfortunately, we were so bad today that the twenty or so points we need from here to be pretty certain of avoiding the drop will look very hard to attain if we keep on playing like we have done in our last three matches especially.
I reckon the thing we must not lose sight of is that if we are not as good as we looked in winning four out of four in September/October it should be equally true to say that we are not as bad as we’ve looked during December (don’t forget we were able to beat Millwall last weekend despite playing like drains).
City also had the partial excuse of being without three of their top four central midfielders this afternoon as Ryan Wintle joined Aaron Ramsey and Joe Ralls on the injured list. This presented Ebou Adams with the opportunity to play alongside Manolis Sipios in the middle of the park, but, as with a few City players, it proved to be a chastening afternoon for him.
City were on the back foot right from the start and just two minute had been played when Ryan Allsop’s long boot down the middle (had City forgotten in the four months since he left us that, as well as being able to play the shorter, sweeper keeper stuff, Allsop also has a kick like a mule?) flew over a square back four to Aaron Connolly who rounded Jak Alnwick, thankfully recalled in place of Alex Runnarson, and would have scored but for Dimitrios Goutas’ sprawling covering clearance.
Criminally, City remained susceptible to this most basic of ploys throughout the ninety minutes, indeed, the third goal came from such a pass.
Hull continued to swarm all over a timid City team that once again looked as if simple pass and move football was beyond them. Despite having Alnwick’s apparently weaker footballing skills behind them which resulted in slightly less playing out from the back, the favoured approach was still plenty of passing between the centre backs and sitting midfielders, but too much of it was backwards and to no purpose. Watching City players looking to pass the ball forward, but then deciding to check back and go back to either the keeper or nearest defender seems to be the pass most commonly played by the team, I know that can’t be true, but it doesn’t half feel as if it is!
Hull under Liam Rosenior are a passing team and the contrast in how they fulfilled that plan in comparison to our laboured and cautious efforts was marked. Not only that, the home side knew that they also had the successful long ball option to fall back on if needs be.
Liam Delap went to Stoke and Preston on loan from Man City last season with a big reputation and did surprisingly little, but here, playing out on the right, he had a very profitable afternoon and he soon had Alnwick scrambling to turn his twenty yarder around a post. Scott Twine got his eye in with a free kick which flew a yard wide with Alnwick helplessly rooted to the spot as the close misses piled up with City’s only response being a Rubin Colwill shot from a Yakou Meite cross which flashed a yard over when he maybe should have done better.
Although City were not looking as ragged as they did in the opening minutes, there were plenty of things happening to keep the home side hopeful that a goal was coming and it duly did in thirty one minutes when Delap got past Jamilu Collins (something that would happen with increasing frequency as the game went on) and his low cross was tapped in by an offside looking Connolly on the far post (a subsequent replay showed he was onside)..
The win against ten man Preston apart, City have been awful when trying to get back in the game after conceding the first goal this season and with their current lack of form and too many immobile forward players, it was hard not to start thinking that it was game over already. Given that we were only to have one on target effort all afternoon (a twenty yard shot by sub Kion Etete which drew a good save from Allsop when we were 3-0 down), I think I can now say I was right to believe that.
I won’t bother too much with the rest of the game except to say that two goals in three second half minutes rendered the last half an hour or so redundant. Twine, who scored from a free kick for Burnley against us in the final game of last season, did the same again as he netted from twenty yards from a set piece farcically conceded by the unfortunate Collins after a curious long back pass by Siopis which presented the home team with the ball well within shooting range brought to an end to another hesitant and tired looking attempt to play out from the back.
Shortly afterwards a neat lob over a stranded Alnwick by Tufan from another long ball completed the scoring and prompted a feeling that Hull felt they had done enough and decided to declare.
After the game, Erol Bulut questioned whether he had put his squad under pressure by talking about making the Play Offs, but I’m not sure about that – it seems to me that we still have too many players whose skill set is not strong enough to play to the level required to employ the passing game in the manner our manager wants us to.
There was a far better game than anything the first team has come up with recently at Leckwith last night when City took on Fulham in a Third Round FA Youth Cup game. Fulham, with their category one Academy team, are third in their league this season and would have been big favourites to win the tie. This they did, but only after a compelling and entertaining game in which they received quite a fright from a City side that could be proud of their efforts.
City led around the half hour mark through Trey George as he finished off a quality move from one end of the pitch to another. Shortly afterwards, Luke Armstrong saved a harshly awarded Fulham penalty and it began to look as if a shock was on the cards. This feeling only increased during an impressive start to the second period from City and then Armstrong made another great save when he tipped a long range shot on to the bar and over.
It was then though that the visitors put together a really nice move which ended with Fulham captain Joshua King sliding the ball past Armstrong to equalise. The last quarter saw both sides going flat out for a winning goal, but as it went into added time before a period of extra time, I thought City were edging it as sub Japhet Matondo was causing the visitors all manner of problems down the right.
A header by a Fulham defender was no more than a yard wide of being a possible match winning own goal, but, from the resultant corner, Luey Giles miscontrolled the ball on the edge of the penalty area and within seconds the play was up the other end as Callum Osmond scored the winner which proved such a sickener for City.
There was finally some football played in the Highadmit South Wales Alliance Premier Division today as top faced bottom with Treherbert Boys and Girls Club hammering Dinas Powys 11-0, but Ton Pentre’s autumn decline continued with a 2-1 home defeat by Porthcawl Town Athletic.
I must also wish ex City Academy member Tom Lockyer all the best following his collapse after suffering a cardiac arrest while playing for Luton at Bournemouth today. The game was eventually abandoned after Lockyer was reported to be stable and alert, but today’s collapse follows his earlier one in the Play Off Final in May. After that Lockyer was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and had a pacemaker fitted before being giving the all clear to carry on playing, but I can’t help thinking that his career may be over tonight – obviously, his health must come first.
Finally, just a quick word regarding the blog. I’ve mentioned before that I’m no longer in the position where financial help from readers is needed to ensure its survival, but, if anyone is still minded to show their support for my scribbles, they are very welcome to do so – payments are accepted by bank transfer, PayPal, cheque and through Patreon, contact me at paul.evans8153@hotmail.com for further information.
A big thank you to all of you who support Mauve and Yellow Army with your donations and to everyone who has done so in the past when help was really needed.
In his post match interview Erol Bulut also admitted that he might be asking his Cardiff side to do ‘too much too quickly’, but has being doing so because he only has a 12 month contract.
On the evidence of several recent games, opposition mangers seem to have sussed that our players are prone to struggle if they employ a press on us from halfway inside our own half, and also we can be caught out by the long ball over the top, either down the middle or diagonally to the channels.
Norwich did the latter in the second half against us before the international break and grabbed a win from being behind.
Preston did the former effectively at the start of the second half of the recent away game and forced Macca into an error which led to a goal.
West Brom employed both effectively against us in the second half, which gave them a win, and even lowly Birmingham effectively did the press on us in the second half too.
What made the Birmingham example worse was that they’d only had one win in nine before playing us, and yet they managed to play out from the back with relative ease whenever they chose to.
I don’t believe it’s time to sound the alarm just yet, and notice that other teams are having poor runs too (witness Preston losing 1-5 at home to Watford yesterday)!
I also realise that so far, Erol has had to build a team from loan and free transfer players only, so many of us are eagerly looking forward to him being able to be a little more adventurous in the January window.
However, I think Erol and his coaching staff are going to need to find a quick solution to counter the weaknesses mentioned if we’re going to get any more points before the New year.
Paul, you watched the game either physically in person or on a screen .. I didn’t, but from your report what stood out for me was “the favoured approach was still plenty of passing between the centre backs and sitting midfielders, but too much of it was backwards and to no purpose. Watching City players looking to pass the ball forward, but then deciding to check back and go back to either the keeper or nearest defender seems to be the pass most commonly played by the team.” That’s what we do nowadays and it’s grim to watch .. I suppose an improvement you noticed was that some of our players actually did bother to look “to pass the ball forward” instead of just across or back! Because we do that passing across and back in midfield and our own penalty area all the time it must be what is expected of our players by the Manager and his coaching team. So … ?
Thanks Paul for you nailing Bulut’s negativity. And thanks to Blue Bayou and Graham for their wise follow-ups.
Just one observation though… PNE did not force Macca into his error: the hapless Karlan Grant did with that senseless back-pass. Alas this chap seems to be ‘teachers pet’ and is thus undroppable.
Having seen the full 90 of this latest shambles, I feel compelled to say that the Turkish TV mogul who owns The Tigers must be ever so happy he has Roseinor in his managerial chair, and not his fellow countryman Bulut.
Bulut is a busted flush methinks… and he helped write his CCS suicide note when he perversely dropped Alnwick… and so heralded this loss of form (yes I know that Runnarsson was between the sticks in the fluky win at Deepdale) … and worse, the loss of SPIRIT.
I hope Vincent does not give him money to waste on a striker in the January window… try first to ensure he sells Robinson to recoup some of the £1.8m we wasted on him.
And yes it will be great to have Rambo and O’Dowda back… and will Rambo still show his amazing Indian Summer form he showed before his recent injury? Let us hope so, but not wishing to be a Jeremiah here, I did say to you Paul, the day he signed for City, that I feared half of his time with us might be spent on the treatment table… (an improvement mark you, on the 75% of time on the treatment table that bringing the golfer from Madrid would have meant).
And if we get Kieffer, we need to get the ball in FRONT of him. And apart from set plays, negative Bulutball precludes such a possibility.
TTFN,
Dai.
Dear All,
It is 11 hours since the ref blew the final whistle at last night’s game at St Andrews, and I am still on a high. Golly gee… The Foxes showed us that this is how to play football… forward, at pace.
Light years away from our slow tiki-taka.
Not that Birmingham were any slouches… and Jordan James with his fine brace, showed that Wales have a nailed-on starter for years to come.
Before signing off… why is it that every interview these days, when footballers want to reply ‘yes, emphatically YES’… they instead say ‘a hundred percent’…?
Who first started this?
It has caught on like the Plague. Not since the advent of ‘early doors’ have we encountered such a madness.
(As for who coined that one, I believe it was a malapropism from Ron Atkinson.)
TTFN,
Dai.
Morning everyone and thanks for your contributions. Come November and December in our last three seasons, the penny seems to drop with City managers that it’s not a good idea to ask our players to try and play a bit more football by playing out from the back. Actually, I tell a lie about 21/22 because Mick McCarthy was never one for such frippery and it was long ball all of the way under him – it was when Steve Morison replaced him in November and then decided in January that he had to play a more direct game as evidenced by the loan signings of Jordan Hugill and Uche Ikpeazu. Neil Harris was under pressure in November 2020 and decided to go more direct in a bid to save his job, but it only bought him a couple of months grace before the axe fell and last season the transformation to the more direct game began in the autumn with Mark Hudson after Morison’s sacking and was completed by Sabri Lamouchi when we appointed our fourth different manager of the season.
This time around, the change is taking longer, but, barring an influx of one or two midfielders of a completely different type to the ones we’ve preferred in the last decade, I think it’s coming and coming pretty soon. What tends to happen is that the penny drops that City STILL don’t have enough players that are comfortable playing in the modern passing style – I disagree with Dai when he talks about City trying to play tiki taka, it’s just a way of playing where all members of the team are comfortable giving and receiving short to medium length passes – the personnel may change from year to year, but it seems that whoever wears the blue Cardiff City shirt, the team are incapable of playing the sort of football that, as blue bayou mentions, a bang out of form Birmingham were able to do against us a week ago.
If sides didn’t know how to play against us this season, a look at a video of the Hull game would soon ell them – Hull pressed us and we had no way of dealing with it because we have central midfielders (apart from Ramsey who, as Dai says, is reaching the stage where he becomes a waste of money because he’s missing so many games) who cannot pass the ball with the speed and accuracy to beat the press in one of the most basic of steps needed to be taken to enable the playing out from the back passing approach to work.
Graham, I believe that what I described is the reason why our attempts to play out from the back are doomed to failure. Even out of form teams which the table tells you are worse than us like Millwall and Birmingham don’t have the problems that we do when they play out from the back. To be fair, I did acknowledge that we were without three of our best four central midfielders on Saturday, but even if Joe Ralls (who I think is not a bac passer of the ball at all) had been playing instead of Ebou Adams, I still think Hull would have had a lot of success with their pressing game against us because we have struggled so much to handle a change of approach which has developed in the game over the past fifteen years or so – our ability to give and take accurate passes is stuck in the eighties and nineties.
I’ll finish with Dai’s “one hundred per cent” which I’ve heard be upgraded to a million per cent at times! However, the one which annoys me he most is where the winning manager says after ab away win that they knew so and so was “a tough place to come to and win” – amazingly, I’ve even heard it said about Cardiff during our three seasons of woeful home form when we lost more on our own patch than we’ve won!
Not satisfied with thumping us last Saturday, yesterday The Tigers signed Billy Sharp.
Mind you… there was no chance he’d sign for us… we don’t pass forward enough.
Just look at that negative fiasco at Hull. The game had hardly started when a 55 yard long pass from Alsopp dissects our high line, giving Hull a great chance, alas for them, not taken. But their last goal did indeed come from a 50 yard long pass. Good managers like Rosenior play the ball forward, into empty space ahead.
Bulutball sees attempts at crossfield doodling which are painful to watch.
Btw, Paul… you have to laugh at the Scott Twine goal. I recommended we bought him when he was banging in his extraordinary free kicks at Rodney Parade. True his career has never quite taken off as one hoped it would… hut he is still a quality player… and Hull realised it, just as they did yesterday, getting Billy Sharp’s services.