Cardiff City mauve and yellow army.

I’ve got this season ticket holder friend who is a regular in the Wales “I told you so” team and around this time for the past few years we have been having the same conversation where he says that pre season friendlies are glorified training matches which the club charge us a small fortune to watch. He has long since stopped going to such matches and tells me each year that I’m wasting my money going to watch them. He’ll be in his “I told you so” element when I see him next on Saturday and, although I’ll answer that it’s always worth going to these games to get an early look at our new players and to see City take on big teams. four “proper” pre season matches at Cardiff City Stadium since it opened without so much as a City goal to celebrate means that my protests will be half hearted ones.

Let’s face it, the punters hardly got their money’s worth last night did they and I can’t help thinking that if a Dave Jones side had played like that then many of those emphasising the positives which came out of the match would be singing a very different tune! City started brightly and could have gone ahead early on, but from around the twenty five minute mark onwards, we struggled for controlled possession and, apart from a long range effort by Joe Mason late in the first half and a possible penalty shout for a foul on the same player after the break, we never looked like scoring. Once we started to make substitutions, it soon became clear that the players coming on were, in most cases, not as good as the ones they were replacing and a second Celtic goal was always more likely than a City equaliser.

The brutal facts are that if we went into the league season with that team and turning in performances like that, then we would spend most of the campaign being concerned with what was happening at the bottom of the table rather than the top, but it needs to be said of course that there were mitigating circumstances behind what happened last night. Firstly, Malky Mackay has stated that we need more players in defence, midfield and attack. Therefore, it’s obvious that our squad is still very much at the “work in progress” stage and when you consider that we had two players (Earnie and Craig Conway) who would be in our strongest current team missing and two more (Quinn and McPhail) who would be pretty strong contenders for a starting place missing from our too small squad as well, then last night’s performance becomes more understandable. As well as this, Celtic were four days from playing their first competitive match of the campaign, whereas it was still eighteen days until we play at West Ham – Celtic wouldn’t have been so much quicker in thought and deed than us if the match had been played in a fortnight’s time.

So, I’m sure that the outlook isn’t as bleak as I painted it earlier, but, I’d still say that last night did further reinforce one aspect of the team building process that our new manager is, surely, already aware of. Malky has said that there will come a time when relying on the Bosman free or, relatively, low cost transfer market will not be enough and we will need to start exploring different options. When he was talking about Craig Bellamy recently, our new manager used the term “X Factor” to define what he could give us at Championship level – I assume what he meant was that Bellamy can give us that something special which can make the difference between taking one point or three or no points and one. Although Earnie and Conway are two players capable of making things happen, I think last night offered proof that we are in need of quite a bit more of the match winning quality that players like Bellamy could give us. On that score. Malky Mackay has said that Peter Whittingham is a very important part of his plans for next season and that soon became clear within minutes of the game starting as everything we did seem to go through him – just as against Reading in his last match at Cardiff City Stadium, I thought Whittingham was very good in the first half, before fading somewhat after the break, but he did seem to be our only real creative outlet and the only possible provider of the aforementioned X Factor.

In saying that, I don’t want to be too critical of his team mates – especially the four new signings on view last night. I thought Gunnarsson was the pick of the new players and showed up well in that initial period when we were on top and I’d say Cowie and Taylor were competent without doing anything spectacular. None of them provided much in the way of inspiration though and, although that may follow with some of them, it could well be that their strengths will lie in other facets of the game. It was much the same up front where Mason was quiet overall while showing a few nice touches (he was fighting something of a lone battle up front at times mind, given Jon Parkin’s ineffective showing) and it was here where this lack of the X Factor showed most.

It looks as if immediate steps are being taken to address this with Scotland International striker Kenny Miller, reportedly, in Cardiff to take a medical today prior to signing a contract with us (I still believe that agreeing terms with the player could be a problem mind). It had been assumed that Miller, who has won fifty five caps for his country, would be returning to Rangers after his ill fated, but highly paid, brief spell with Bursaspor, but, with the Glasgow club’s bid being well below the fee of around £800,000 that City are, seemingly, willing to pay, it looks like they may have missed out on a player who scored twenty two goals for them last season before moving to Turkey in January. It also seems certain that we will by signing Slovakian Under 21 captain Filip Kiss on a season long loan deal from Slovan Bratislava. Twenty year old Kiss is a midfield player who scored six times in twenty nine matches last season as his club performed the domestic double – little else is known about him and the only thing you’ll find on You Tube featuring  him are pictures of the Stuttgart keeper clogging him in a Europa League match!

City’s interest in Miller is being taken to mean that we are no longer after David Goodwillie by some. While I can see the logic behind that thinking, I reckon it’s more likely that Miller’s wages at Cardiff if he signed (he is reportedly on £45k a week at Bursaspor, but realises that he will have to take a significant wage cut if he is to return to the UK) would make it more likely that it will be Craig Bellamy who we will stop chasing  because we would surely be looking at a combined wage of £50k a week or more for them. Anyway, Goodwillie is due in Court today to answer an assault charge and there are still plenty who maintain that he will be signing for Cardiff as long as there is a favourable outcome to the case for him.

Although there was talk before hand of there still being some new signings made while the squad were over in Spain for a week long training camp near Seville, the experience of previous years under Dave Jones suggested otherwise (without looking it up, I can only remember Michael Chopra’s transfer to Sunderland in 2007 while he was in Portugal as an example of a transfer into/from Cardiff City while we were out of the country during pre season training). Therefore, the main topic of City related conversation once a new manager was appointed, that is speculation about new signings, took something of a back seat this week as the squad combined the task of getting fitter with something of a team bonding exercise in sweltering southern Spain before finishing the whole thing off with last night’s game with Charlton Athletic.

Actually, there have been a few new arrivals since my last piece on here. Although this hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else, a normally reliable Ipswich Town site is reporting that we have found a new goalkeeping coach to replace Martyn Margetson – I can’t give you any more info about James Hollman because, to be honest, I’d never heard of him before and there’s not much more than what appears in that article about him on the Internet. On the pitch, the Joe Mason transfer was confirmed last Sunday afternoon and he flew out to Spain to join up with his new team mates the following day. The other new player came as something of a surprise when it was revealed yesterday that former Metz striker Rudi Gestede had been with the squad all week and would feature as a trialist in the Charlton game. Although Gestede’s record for a club that only avoided relegation to the third tier of the French league system by one point looks nothing special on paper, his efforts in last night’s match (more on that later) must have gone a long way towards earning him another chance to impress against Celtic on Wednesday.

Trialist Rudi Gestede is congratulated by Lee Naylor after scoring the only goal of last night's match with Charlton Athletic.

Apart from that, there’s little to report on the transfer speculation front. Speaking after last night’s match, Malky Mackay talked of there still being a need for “two or three more bodies” before the season proper kicks off (in an ideal world, I’d say it should be four of five), but, apart from the possibility of one of them being Rudi Gestede, there’s very little to report on that front. There was a flurry of speculation in midweek that Craig Bellamy was on the brink of rejoining us and this was reflected by the fact that the odds on him coming back to Cardiff went as low as 1/3 shortly afterwards. Seeing as one of the sources of this info is someone who got most things right about the Bellamy move last season, I believe that there might be something to this speculation, but I have always thought that we have to wait until mid August at the earliest if we are to get Bellamy again and I see little reason to change that opinion yet – Manchester City will surely hold out as long as they can before they even consider releasing him from his contract. One last little snippet, a poster on one of the messageboards who is, seemingly, based in Iceland and got virtually everything about the Ason Gunnarsson deal right has said that we have been watching Lillestrom atriker Björn Bergmann Sigurdarson who, like Gunnarsson, featured for Iceland in the recent European under 21 Championships, recently. It’s possible to make virtually any one look good in a You Tube video, but I like the fact he had the vision to score with a quickly taken free kick from out on the touchline in this compilation, while here he is in goalscoring action in a match played last night (four mins forty seconds into the action).

As for the match with Charlton, well it sounds like a pretty low key affair, but City got off to a winning start against a side that you would have presumed were further advanced in the pre season fitness stakes than us having been victorious in their two previous warm up matches (one of which was against Bristol City). Both sides made eleven changes at half time in what were still very warm conditions despite the evening kick off and with Paul Quinn, Steve McPhail and Jon Meades all missing out on the trip through injury and David Marshall (minor wrist injury) and Anthony Gerrard (returning from compassionate leave after the death of a relative) also omitted, it meant that all three of our first year pros (Ibby Farah, Nat Jarvis and Alex Evans) got forty five minutes of action as well as our six new signings. Judging by the very brief highlights I’ve seen on the official site, City looked more dangerous in the first half as Gestede in particular offered a goal threat, forcing the Charlton keeper into a diving save with a header and then having an angled volley ruled out for offside before getting the only of the game as he turned an opponent and then cut in from the left to score with a low shot from around twenty yards. City, who used Peter Whittingham in central midfield in the first half and Don Cowie there alongside captain Aron Gunnarsson (Mark Hudson having worn the arm band in the first half) after the break had luck on their side when Charlton hit bar and post in quick succession and Jordan Santiago had to make a fine save in the dying moments, but it was good to hear Malky Mackay talking after the game about us being a little bit sharper than our opponents – overall, an encouraging start to the new era at Cardiff City Stadium.