Cardiff City mauve and yellow army.

This season has been one of the more enjoyable ones so far with most matches I’ve watched at all levels offering decent entertainment. As such, Saturday’s performance was very much an exception to the general Cardiff City rule in 2011/12, but I’m afraid it was more of the same this afternoon at a bitterly cold Leckwith Stadium as a City Development team featuring a load of players I didn’t recognise (I think there must have been a few trialists) involved went down 2-0 to a Plymouth Argyle team that looked to have a few more experienced players in it than ours did. Dekel Keinan and Paul Quinn played the ninety minutes and Theo Wharton came on as a sub for the last half an hour or so, but they were the only players with first team experience involved. I’ve not seen enough of Kadeem Harris yet to recognise him, but I think he might have been wearing the number seven shirt and, if it was him then I can say he looked quite pacy and lively, showed he could cross with either foot and go inside or outside his marker, but, ultimately, there was not much of an end product from him – as was the case with all of his team mates.

Virtually every game I’ve seen has provided some talking point or another I could use to produce a few paragraphs on here, but, there really isn’t much I can say at all about this afternoon’s match. Two weeks ago across the road at Cardiff City Stadium, Crystal Palace played for one hundred and twenty minutes without having a single shot on target and, unless there was one in the first couple of minutes that I missed, City failed to muster one in the ninety minutes today. In fact it’s hard to remember them ever looking remotely threatening – there was a scramble in the Plymouth area where a couple of goalbound shots were blocked by defenders and our number eleven fired a presentable chance over just before the end, but that was about it as far as goalmouth action went.

Both of these incidents occurred in the second half and the second forty five minutes was at least an improvement on a turgid opening half in which both goalkeepers got plenty of practice dealing with backpasses , but there was precious little else for them to do. Plymouth weren’t much better than City, but, they deserved their win because they at least managed some efforts on target (although you could count them on the fingers of one hand) – the first goal was suitably scrappy as a mishit shot by the visitor’s left back found it’s way to one of his colleagues and he poked a shot beyond the keeper from around the penalty spot. Twenty minutes or so later, Plymouth doubled the lead when their impressive, and tiny, number eleven got the wrong side of Quinn and calmly put away a right wing cross from about ten yards out.