Peter Thorne – Cardiff City penalty taker supreme?

Posted on August 17, 2011 by The other Bob Wilson

I always say I can’t choose between Ronnie Bird and Chris Pike whenever the subject of the best penalty taker you’ve seen at Cardiff comes up for discussion – both men took something like fifteen penalties for us each and missed just the one (Bird at the Vetch in a Welsh Cup tie in 1970 and Pike in a top of the table clash with Barnet in 1992) – if I really had to choose, I think I’d probably go for Pike because I get the feeling he took one or two more than Bird, but it’s very hard to separate them.

However, if you think of penalty taking as an art and put that together with it being probably the biggest test of nerve an individual gets in this team game, then another name springs to mind. Peter Thorne only took five penalties for us, but he never looked like missing one (that is, once you’d worked out what his method was!) and, if the measure of someone’s ability from the spot is the amount of confidence you have in them when they begin their run up to the ball, then Thorne was the best penalty taker I’ve seen for the club. I can remember watching Thorne’s first penalty for us against Gillingham at Ninian Park and thinking you lucky so and so as what seemed to be a scuffed shot rolled gently into the net in a fairly central position with the keeper Bossu having committed to going the other way – it looked like a replay of Andy Campbell’s infamous miss from the spot a few months earlier against Leeds except that Thorne was lucky that the keeper had guessed wrong.

Less than a month after that, City were awarded a penalty with the score 0-0 well into the second half against Forest. This time we were attacking the Grange End and so I had a better view of Thorne’s technique as he took a slow run up and, once again, rolled the ball not too far from the centre of the goal, yet the Forest keeper Gerrard was powerless to stop it. From closer range, I was able to see that Thorne had waited for Gerrard to show a sign of committing to going one way and then made sure he put the ball in the opposite direction – it didn’t need to be a powerful shot because there was no way the keeper could recover their balance enough to get there. Thorne took two penalties in away matches, at Leeds and Stoke, and he shut the racket being made by the home supporters out of his mind to score using exactly the same method. The one at Stoke was the last one Thorne took for us and by now keepers facing one of his penalties must have known what was coming, but the experienced Steve Simonsen was just like the rest – he blinked first in the poker game with Thorne and found himself picking the ball out of the net.

Richard Langley looks on as a very cool looking Peter Thorne celebrates putting us ahead against Brighton.

I can’t say for certain, but my impression now is that as many as three of the keepers Thorne beat did not even dive, they just put their weight on the one foot and were then unable to shift their balance quick enough to get to the gently rolling ball that was frustratingly just out of their reach. From memory, Brighton’s inexperienced American keeper David Yeldell didn’t dive when Thorne beat him sixteen minutes into what was a crucial game at Ninian Park in February 2005 between two sides too close to the relegation places for comfort. The penalty had been awarded when Richard Langley was fouled while trying to reach an Alan Lee header that had hit the bar and there were very few protests from the visitors about referee Russell’s decision.

James Collins turns away after seeing his header beat Yelldell to make it 2-0 and the game is as good as over.

With Brighton averaging less than a goal a game that season, they were always going to struggle after going behind and three minutes later (with still less than twenty minutes played), the game was  as good as over when young centre half James Collins powered in a header from a Graham Kavanagh free kick out near the right hand touchline. City’s superiority was such at this point that the opportunity was there for a really big win, but, despite a run of improved results since the turn of the year, confidence had been dented by a first half of the season which has seen us perched just above the bottom three for most of the time. Therefore, City were perfectly happy to sit on their 2-0 lead and the rest of the match became a bit of a bore. That all round nice guy Leon Knight forced a good save from Neil Alexander (who had recently regained his place in the team after more than a year out which had seen him ranked below Tony Warner and Martyn Margetson in the goalkeeping pecking order at times) when the visitors threatened for just about the only time, but there was precious little to keep the crowd enthused.

Not that anybody was too bothered about that – the win took us seven points clear of the bottom three with a significantly better goal difference than those around us, it seemed we could start forgetting about relegation. The thing was though that, despite the long running saga regarding the proposed new stadium, the full extent of the club’s financial problems were still not known. However, when City next played on a Saturday at Ninian Park three weeks later, it was the day after Black Friday and we had sold Kav amid fears that, never mind relegation, there might not be a Cardiff City to support next season.

Under the circumstances, it was little wonder that the forward momentum of the early weeks of 2005 was, largely, lost and a 3-0 defeat at Preston in April looked at the time as if it could be a fatal blow to our chances of staying up. The team rallied from there though and two wins and two draws from our last four matches left us four points clear of the drop zone in sixteenth place. It had been a close run thing, but, in truth, City were just a decent goalscorer short of being a mid table team. The fact that they didn’t lose a single match to any of the bottom six clubs shows that City were better than the other teams who had spent the season fighting the drop and, unlike recent, more successful, City teams they were able to comfortably dispatch the three sides destined to go down at home – bottom placed Rotherham were beaten by a couple of Peter Thorne headers and Gillingham and Forest were seen off by 3-1 and 3-0 respectively with Thorne getting a couple in each match – significantly though, it had needed one of his ice cool penalties to put us ahead in either game.

12 February 2005

Cardiff City 2 Brighton and Hove Albion 0

City Alexander; Weston, Gabbidon, Collins (1), Barker; McAnuff, Kavanagh, Inamoto (Bullock), Langley; Thorne (1), Lee (Ledley) Subs (not used) Warner, Vidmar, Williams

Brighton Yelldell; Virgo, Hinshelwood, Butters; Reid (Harding), Nicolas, Carpenter, Jones (Watson), Mayo (Hart), McCammon, Knight Subs (not used) May, Hammond

HT 2-0

Att. 11,435

 

Posted in Memories, 1963 - 2023 | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Mackay approach becomes clearer and it’s like a breath of fresh air!

Posted on August 15, 2011 by The other Bob Wilson

Compared to the average for this division, Dave Jones was in charge at Cardiff City for a very long time. Six years is about four times more than managers tend to get in the Championship, so I suppose it’s only natural that his way of going about things has had some sort of influence on how we, as supporters, tend to think about things. An example of this came early in yesterday’s 3-1 win over Bristol City, when Aron Gunnarsson suffered an injury which, pretty obviously, was going to lead to him being substituted. I immediately notified the people that I was with that this would mean that Paul Quinn would replace Gunnarsson with Andrew Taylor moving forward into midfield – after all, that’s what Dave Jones would have done in the same situation, but I was soon to learn that our new manager thinks differently!

The substitution I was on about was, essentially, a defensive one – Taylor has proved himself as a left sided midfield player at this level, but, by his own admission, prefers to play left back and it’s only logical that this, albeit unconsciously, effects his thinking at times if he is being used in midfield. However, our new manager decided to go with bringing another attacking player on and wasn’t he proved to be right in his thinking over the next eighty minutes!  Joe Mason bettered his impressive showing against Parma in the final pre season match with one that had Bristol City not knowing how to cope with him during that first half when City played their local rivals off the park. Mason was involved in virtually every move of significance that City produced – he showed a turn of pace that came as a surprise to me and, more importantly, our opponents while looking a natural for that position in “the hole” at the tip of a four man diamond midfield.

On that form, it’s going to be hard to keep Mason out even when Gunnarsson, Kiss and McPhail are fit enough to be considered and when we have brought in the new players that we still need despite our very good start.  Joe was my City man of the match yesterday on a day when there were so many candidates for that award (e.g. Cowie, Whittingham and McNaughton), but it was also very pleasing to see Craig Conway giving a demonstration as to why he may well become a very important member of the team over the next nine months. When you talk about wide midfield players, most supporters, myself included, automatically think “winger” and they also have a mental picture of the sort of player a winger should be – quick, tricky and skilful like Chris Burke was at his best.

Perhaps not your typical "winger", but, on yesterday's evidence, still very effective - Craig Conway celebrates his goal.

Based on the evidence so far, Conway does not have these crowd pleasing qualities in abundance, but there is more than one way to be an effective winger/wide midfield player and if there is one player from the past who he puts me in mind of at the moment it is Steve Guppy the former Leicester and England winger. Guppy was never one for the electrifying burst past his marker or the dazzling bit of skill which left a full back flat on his backside, but he worked very hard for the team and created no end of goals with his crossing ability. All Guppy needed was a yard or so of space to get his cross in and in it would come – invariably accurate and delivered to strikers who knew it was coming and were able to time their runs accordingly, rather having to start all over again as their supply line chose to check back and try to beat his man again. Maybe the coming weeks and months will show this opinion to be wrong, but at the moment Conway looks like someone who our strikers will love because they know, more often than not, a good cross is coming in – besides this, Conway appears to be able to cross off either foot (for someone listed as being right footed, it wasn’t a bad finish with his “weaker” foot for his goal) as well as work tremendously hard for the team.

The easiest goal Earnie's ever scored? However, the nature of his celebration and his words after the game made it obvious how much his first goal back in a City shirt meant to him.

Conway wasn’t the only City player working hard though, far from it and, after the hardest working of the lot, Don Cowie, had been denied a deserved goal by David James after a superb passage of play also involving McNaughton and Mason, Earnie made it 3-0 with just over half an hour played for the moment that got the biggest single cheer in an afternoon full of them. Earnie’s last goal for us in his first spell was on 24 August 2004 at Kidderminster in the League Cup and, almost seven years later, he got off the mark second time around with a tap in from all of three yards to, effectively, kill the game off.

Should a thirtysomething really be doing this? Earnie celebrates making it 3-0.

When a team is well in front at the interval, the second half often tends to be an anti climax and this proved to be the case yesterday. In saying that though, City’s work rate was still impressive and you got the impression that there was another gear to be found if it was needed. It’s in the nature of things that there will always be criticism from some quarters even after the most comprehensive of wins, but I do find that some of the stuff said about our defending for their goal was just having a go for the sake of having a go. Yes, the wurzels were poor – their patched up central defence creaked and groaned all afternoon and McAllister had a nightmare before joining Jay Lloyd Samuel in the left backs subbed at half time club, but, every team in this league has players with the ability to hurt us and Campbell-Rice and Maynard did that with their consolation goal. When the performance and victory are as good as they were yesterday, I prefer to celebrate the things that we did well rather than dwell on the, very few, occasions when we didn’t get it right.  Let those who are paid to do it by the club carry out the inquests if they are needed – there aren’t going to be many games when we can effectively declare after 36 minutes this season, so I’m just going to savour the fact that we could yesterday.

If one incident epitomised what the team is about at the moment it came in the dying minutes when the game was, to all intents and purposes, over and done with. We had a free kick in the corner where the Canton Stand meets the Ninian Stand and Whittingham and Cowie were stood over the ball which the latter played short to Kenny Miller who almost scored. Within seconds though the wurzels were breaking clear through Campbell-Rice in a position diagonally opposite where the free kick was taken from and there was Whittingham (yes, that’s Peter Whittingham!) busting a gut to get back and help the defence out – I thought Whitts put a great, and often unglamorous, shift in for the team yesterday and, although he may not always look like a natural athlete, his work rate so far, allied to his performance in pre season fitness and stamina tests, rather suggests that he is. Anyway, I suppose the real test for Whittingham and the rest will come when we have lost a few games and it’s a cold winter’s day somewhere up north – if Malky Mackay can get the same response from his players then that he is now (and gets the new players he says we still need), then forget talk about consolidation, we can start looking at the top six again.

Posted in Out on the pitch | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments