Cardiff City mauve and yellow army.

So, a little over a year after starting this blog off, this entry becomes the hundredth time Messrs Woodruff, Reece and Kellock have put in an appearance on here in that bloody awful kit from nearly forty years ago. I only noticed this morning that I was just about to reach my century, so I can’t say that I had given any thought beforehand to what this entry should be about, but, given the way the past nine months especially have gone, I would have thought that the odds would have been on it being an analysis of the latest financial crisis to hit the club.

Over the close season I posted weekly updates on here which made for pretty depressing reading as what I had hoped would be reports of squad strengthening instead turned into estimates as to when the reasons for us being under a transfer embargo would be sorted out and whether the planned High Court case for 11 August would go ahead. Things got so bad that on 25 July I wrote;

“This blog will be celebrating it’s first birthday within the next week, but, for the first time, contributing to it has become a chore not a pleasure. The unremitting stream of bad news stories that Cardiff City fans have had to endure this summer has to start sapping one’s enthusiasm eventually and within the last week or two it’s become harder for me to maintain the sort of optimism that fans of every club in the country should be feeling around this time of year.”

I am pretty certain that I wasn’t alone in feeling so down about the club and the new season which was only a fortnight away. The hangover from defeat at Wembley always meant that it would be a pretty miserable summer for City fans, but the drip, drip of bad news stories on almost a daily basis was doing absolutely nothing to dispel the gloom – so how was it that, around three weeks since I had written of my disenchantment, this 54 year old went down to Cardiff City Stadium almost floating on air yesterday afternoon and in a state of high excitement which reminded me of those days from my youth, which I never thought I would experience again, when watching us play was just about the most important thing in my life?

Well, the lifting of the embargo contributed a little towards the transformation, as did the return of Jason Koumas, the signing of Seyi Olofinjana and a good win at Derby, but, with due respect to the two players named who are good enough to have  a major influence in the team this season, it was the arrival of Craig Bellamy (yes that’s Craig Bellamy!) on a season long loan deal from Manchester City that was almost wholly responsible for the change of mood.

I think it’s fair to say that I was a bit more optimistic than many others that there just might be something to the summer long speculation that linked us with Bellamy, but, if I am being honest, I never really expected it to happen. Yes, those comments last week before the Wales v Luxembourg match re emphasised that it wasn’t complete pie in the sky, but, come on, players of Bellamy’s standard don’t drop a division to sign for their home town club having just had what was, arguably, their best season in a long career do they.

I think I have mentioned before on here that sometimes I try to imagine how I would react if another Championship side had done something which City had and when you apply that test to the Bellamy situation, I think I would be absolutely amazed and more than a little jealous if someone of his stature had done something which, in terms of age of player, is akin to Gary Lineker signing for Leicester just after he had won the FA Cup with Spurs back in 1991.

As the doyen of Cardiff City messageboard posters Caliburn never stopped reminding me, I got a little bit excited when we signed Robbie Fowler, but there was always that realisation that he was a player with injury problems who had been in decline for years – Fowler’s reputation made him a very, very high profile signing by our standards, but I don’t believe there was total surprise from most Cardiff fans when it all turned out like it did. The situation with Craig Bellamy is completely different – yes, he has long spells out with injury during his career and he has a history of knee problems, but seventy two games for club and country in the past two years confirms the feeling that the training regime tailored specifically for him that he has been following lately has worked.

The deal to sign Bellamy is being widely described as the biggest in City’s history and I find it hard to argue with that point of view – certainly, I’ve not seen anything like it in my near half a century of supporting the club. My parents used to tell me about the impact the signing of Trevor Ford in 1953, for what was a huge fee in those of £30,000, had nationally when he arrived from Sunderland and there are definite similarities between the two transfers – Ford was just a few months younger than Bellamy is now when we signed him, he was no stranger to controversy and, by all accounts, was a fine player. However, City were into their second season of a five year spell in the old First Division then and so that makes me think that signing Ford could not be seen as the sort of coup that bringing Bellamy to Cardiff is.

Of course, it was somehow typically Cardiff City that their big day was slightly tarnished by news that Motherwell were demanding payment of the rest of the Paul Quinn transfer fee having taken City to court in Hamilton last Friday on the matter. It had been widely assumed that this debt had been settled and the fact that it hasn’t been is a reminder that our financial problems have not gone away. There are plenty of questions raised by this historic transfer, but they are for another time – for now,  welcome to Cardiff City Craig Bellamy and  thank you for making my hundredth entry on here such a pleasure to write.

Being a blog that prides itself on it’s lack of inside info when it comes to Cardiff City, don’t expect the definitive statement (as if!) on whether Craig Bellamy will actually be signing for us later today. I don’t have my “sources” working away tirelessly to try and uncover the truth as I rely purely on gut instinct (which often turns out to be wrong) for my “exclusives”.

What I can reveal though is that from about mid afternoon onwards yesterday rumours grew at a rapid rate that Bellamy would be returning to his hometown club on a six month loan deal which would be confirmed today. Although the day ended with confusion, which still exists now, as to what was going to happen, for a short while it was looking nailed on that he would be signing for Cardiff, so what happened to to get people thinking that what many thought was impossible was about to happen?

What is certain is that Skybet’s odds on Bellamy coming to Cardiff (which had been around the 7/1 mark when I looked late last week) started to come in dramatically yesterday- at one time they reached 1/3 before they stopped accepting bets on the matter with the odds at 2/5. As well as that, there were messageboard posts during the afternoon from people claiming to have been told that the deal was on and these increased in regularity until it got to the stage where Media Wales posted a story on their website (later withdrawn for a more non committal piece) that a signing was imminent. At the same time, the poster on the second most popular Cardiff City messageboard, who his admirers claim gets 95% of his inside info right, was declaring that it was true – Bellamy was coming (he later admitted that the Bellamy for Cardiff claim he had made earlier might just fall into the 5% of “exclusives” that he gets wrong).

It didn’t stop there either as another Media Wales journalist (the man who promised to run naked down Sloper Road if the new stadium got built and then didn’t when it was and the man who told us in July 2007 that Jason Koumas was signing for us on a permanent basis) appeared on Talksport to tell the world that Bellamy was coming to Cardiff and this had been confirmed in discussions he had with “agents” (not Bellamy’s apparently). Later media stories were less strident about where Bellamy was going to end up, but there appeared to be a general agreement that the player was not welcome at Manchester City at the moment and that they had given their permission for Bellamy to train with City from today while he sorts his future out.

So what does my gut instinct tell me about all of the above? Well, that’s a tough one. Looking at it from the optimistic point of view, I would say that the “no smoke without fire” argument seems a strong one and that the statement by a “Cardiff spokesman” in this BBC piece is hardly the categorical denial you might have expected if there was nothing to the story (of course it’s pure speculation “at this stage”!).

However, to measure against that, you have the cold logic which shouts the question how can a club that has been paying what have seemed like monthly visits to the High Court this year to argue that they not be wound up for non payment of bills and whose officials talked on the day that the club’s transfer embargo was lifted of the possibility of another one being imposed within weeks, if not days, possibly countenance a deal which sees the player, who I rate as possibly the best British born performer in last season’s Premiership, end up playing for Cardiff City?

Those who say Bellamy is coming, will, no doubt, point to Vincent Tan’s billions and say that they make almost anything possible and it’s true to say that, when the Bellamy to Cardiff rumours started back in May, I didn’t rule them out completely because I wondered whether it would be the way that the Malaysians would make their “statement of intent” when it came to their plans with Cardiff City. That was three months ago though and the intervening period has seen further unpaid bills, staff not being paid on time and another transfer embargo and yet, I also remember both TG and Vincent Tan saying that our debt (which us mere mortals think of as being almost overwhelming) was relatively small – this is a sign of the sort of world they conduct their business in and the cost of any deal for Bellamy would be small by their terms.

What needs to be said about that though is that firstly, without a full explanation from the club as to how the deal would be funded and structured if it did come off, I would have to agree with those supporters of other Championship clubs who would argue that it is morally wrong for Cardiff to not pay their bills and settle with their creditors (many of whom could be small businesses for whom the money they are owed could be the difference between continued trading and liquidation) while finding a huge sum every week (the figure of £45,000 has been mentioned) to pay the wages of a loaned footballer. On top of that, I would have thought any deal for Bellamy would make it impossible for City to play the “I’d like to pay you, but were skint” card again because it would almost certainly mean that the Malaysians would have shown their hand and would have to move towards the takeover of the club that many suspected would happen eventually – if Bellamy signs today, it would surely have to happen sooner rather than later.

Anyway, what was the question again? Oh yes, do I think Craig Bellamy will be signing for us today – sorry, I’ve not got a bloody clue.