Normal service resumed at Cardiff as away results and performances surpass home ones.

Posted on February 4, 2024 by The other Bob Wilson

Anyone mad enough to read through the last three months worth of match reaction pieces on here in one go would be ploughing their way through a tale of woe – it’s been grim stuff, but it needs to be said that the misery has, to a great extent, been down to what the fans at Cardiff City Stadium have had to endure.

The Christmas cracker that was Cardiff 2 Plymouth 2 on Boxing Day has been the sole reminder that football can be an enjoyable game to watch for those long suffering supporters who only get to watch City’s home matches – even the one match we have won since October, was a thoroughly miserable affair that had nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that it got us three points.

On the other hand, those fans who are able to attend away matches on a regular basis aren’t doing too badly. Although it’s been a gloomy winter for City, it’s worth noting that even a modest set of recent home results would have ensured it was nothing of the kind.

Today’s game at Watford saw another sold out away end to go with the one at Plymouth a fortnight ago and a very good turn out at Queens Park Rangers on New Year’s Day and the obvious question this prompts, given our slide down the table and generally poor level of performance, is “why?”. Why are supporters travelling in such numbers lately to watch us?

My slightly facetious answer is that if you want to watch Cardiff City win a game these days (and for much of the previous three seasons) you have to be prepared to make round trips of hundreds of miles to go and watch them play away. Similarly, your chances of catching a halfway decent display from City are greatly increased if you are willing, and able, to put the miles in for your team.

It may come as a shock to some to learn that while City have been stinking the place out at home while taking four points from a possible twenty one, today’s 1-0 win at Vicarage Road (our third straight win at that ground) was our fourth away victory in our last seven Championship matches. True, we were second best at Preston for long periods and the win at Sheffield Wednesday was a case of floodlight robbery, but, in both cases, the fact that we came from 1-0 down to win with a pair of late goals meant that there was a bit more than just the result to make the matches memorable.

The 2-1 win at QPR was deserved in my view and we played pretty well there, while today was somewhere in the middle I’d say – we played better than we did at Preston and Sheffield, but with a last twenty five minutes or so which resembled Rorke’s Drift at times, even this completely biased City fan is struggling to argue that we deserved three points.

That’s not to say that we rode our luck though – we were maybe the slightly better team in the first half, then got right on top in the game’s third quarter before coming under incessant pressure late on, but, even then, the defending, which has been quite well below the standard set earlier in the season lately, was resolute and unyielding.

There were strong performances all over the pitch as, in a team which did not include one of the five newcomers, or the fit again Aaron Ramsey, in the starting line up, centre backs Dimitri Goutas and Mark McGuinness were in their element against forwards they could physically dominate.

At right back, I though Perry Ng was brilliant as he looked like a player full of confidence who would be at home at the top end of this league or, possibly, higher. For some reason, I found myself appreciating how skilful Ng is more than I usually do. I suppose little things like the perfect nutmeg he performed just before our goal helped in that regard, but there was also his sheer dependability and authority when defending – Ng was City’s Player of the Year last season, but it seems to me that his game has come on quite a bit in 23/34 and, at the moment, he looks very well placed to retain his trophy.

I’d also like to mention six players who have been feeling the wrath of fans to varying degrees through our bad spell. Jak Alnwick could easily find himself left out again once the visa issue that prevented Ethan Horvath taking his place in the squad has been resolved, but, as he’s done so often this season, he made it hard for Erol Bulut to leave him out with a calm and competent showing in which his distribution was probably better than normal.

Jamilu Collins has had his critics lately and I thought he was struggling in the run up to Christmas, but I had him down as one of the few bright spots at Plymouth and he continued that improvement today.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Ryan Wintle has come to be associated with the sideways and backwards passing game which has characterised City in home games in particular lately, but I think that’s harsh and there was one incident today which I thought showed him in a very good light. David Turnbull came on for the last half an hour or so and, like the other three newcomers we saw, had little chance to impress when in possession. However, there was one mishit pass from him which could have caused his side real problems were it not for Wintle’s willingness to chase back forty yards to put in a great block to clear up a dangerous situation.

Rubin Colwill’s place in the side will come under pressure with the arrival of Turnbull and the return of Ramsey, but, today he responded to that challenge with a performance that, for a while in the second half, saw him taking charge of a game in a way I’d not seen him do before. It wasn’t perfect by any means because while we saw plenty of the eye catching footwork which can gain him space where there seems to be none, there were then too many wrong options or misplaced passes to give his display the complete picture you get from the very best.

Nevertheless, it was a very encouraging showing by Rubin – especially for those of us who have fought his corner for the last three years since he burst on to the scene. Until we scored, Colwill came closest to finding the net with a well struck left foot shot from over twenty yards out which flew not too far over and the chance was created for him by a very nice lay off to him by Kion Etete.

It was Etete’s best piece of target man play on an afternoon where his growing army of critics would probably have seen very little to make them question their opinions of him. However, I reckon Erol Bulut would have loved Etete’s performance as he worked so hard for the team and the manager who has this thing about players doing their bit when out of possession could not have had any complaints about his centre forward on that score as he was even filling in at right back at times when we were under really fierce pressure – the fact that Etete was still on the pitch with ten minutes to play rather tells a story I feel.

I mentioned the term centre forward earlier and, of course, there will be those who, quite reasonably, ask whether a player in that position should be as preoccupied with defending as Etete was? I suppose what I’m trying to get over here is that maybe some recognition should be given to the fact that playing as a target man for Cardiff City is a very hard job given the quality of service and lack of support they tend to get and that task is made even harder under a manager so intent on ensuring that his attacking players do their bit defensively.

There were those who would happily have cancelled Josh Bowler’s loan during the January window and it was hard to disagree for much of the first half, but he will be forgiven an awful lot if he can come up with a few more goals like todays match winner in the forty third minute.

One of those quality bits of play from Ng that so impressed me today provided a pass to Bowler which he received about thirty yards out. The winger still had a lot to do though as he beat a couple of opponents before curling a left footed shot from twenty yards well beyond the diving Ben Hamer for a goal which probably deserves to be in our top five for this season.

I’m probably going over the top about our performance today, but after what was a shameful capitulation against Leeds, it was so good to see City so united – every one, including newcomers Turnbull, Wilson-Esbrand, Phillips and Diedhiou, mucked in and protected our lead with an intensity which will have some (not me though!) saying that a top six finish is still on.

In the Highadmit South Wales Alliance Premier Division, Ton Pentre have turned a corner after they recorded a fourth straight win with a 7-1 trouncing of Cardiff Airport, while Treherbert Boys and Girls Club were unable to cash in on a defeat for leaders Cwmamman as they were held 2-2 at home in a fourth v third clash with Porthcawl Town Athletic.

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Seven decades of Cardiff City v Watford matches.

Posted on February 2, 2024 by The other Bob Wilson

I asked the question yesterday whether City had been the busiest team in the country during the transfer window which closed at eleven o clock last night. I don’t know the answer to that question, but I strongly suspect it was us. Whether this is a good thing or not given the reputation the January transfer window has as a difficult time to conduct a rebuilding of a team, is a moot point, but I would say something had to be done, because, although the table might not have been reflecting it, we’ve been playing like a relegation side in some of our recent matches.

Most of the movement was in an outward direction and I couldn’t list all of those who left the club, mostly on loan, in the last few weeks – Alex Runnarsson (released by Arsenal after his loan deal here was cut short), Ebou Adams (to Derby on loan), Andy Rinomhota (to Rotherham on loan), Jonathan Panzo (back to Forest) and Ike Ugbo (to Sheffield Wednesday on loan) are the players who have been involved with the first team (apologies if I’ve missed anyone else).

However, there have been a host of younger players who have left on loan and so the under 21 team is going to be featuring a lot of Academy players in the next three months and with this week’s 2-0 home loss to QPR proving to be a good example of how things have been going for them this season, a side that was struggling anyway look set to do so even more until the end of the season.

Interestingly though, three players Erol Bulut identified before Christmas as needing a move out on loan are staying put and look set to be playing out the rest of the season at age group level – it’s hard to see how they could benefit from this.

Maybe Joel Colwill, Cian Ashford and Cameron Antwi stayed here because they will feature in the first team squad, but with all cup interest gone now, you have to wonder to what end, given our manager’s reluctance to use any of them when they were on the bench for Championship fixtures in which no one was playing well.

As for as incoming moves go, we’ve got five newcomers and I would expect all of them to be in the squad for tomorrow’s game at Watford. Runnarsson’s departure enabled the permanent signing of USA international Ethan Horvarth from Nottingham Forest to go through. Horvarth is chasing an unusual hat trick as he came on as a sub goalkeeper for the dying minutes of Forest’s Play Off Final win over Huddersfield in 2022 and was in the Luton team which beat Coventry in the Final last year. Hovarth’s chances of completing that hat trick have to be remote in the extreme, but his time on loan at Luton where he played forty four times in their promotion campaign strongly suggests that, first he’ll replace Jak Alnwick as first choice keeper and, second, he should offer an improvement on Runnarsson.

Nat Phillips signed for Liverpool a few years ago at a time when they had a lot of injuries to centrebacks and did pretty well for them in the short term, but, hardly surprisingly, he dropped out of contention as the injured players returned and he spent the first past of this season on loan at Celtic. That arrangement was terminated by Liverpool because Phillips was not playing enough in Celtic’s first team and so you have to think that they only agreed to Phillips coming here on loan on the basis that he will be starting most weeks for us. As the likely casualty in such a situation is Mark McGuinness, the sort of young player we should be looking to build the team around in future years, I have my misgivings about this deal, I suppose it’s a case of wait and see.

The same applies to another loan signing Joshua Wilson-Esbrand who I must admit I know nothing about. The encouraging things are that he plays for Manchester City, he is versatile (he can play all along the left hand side and, according to our manager, can operate in central midfield as well), he did pretty well with Coventry last season (he was an unused sub in their Play Off Final defeat) and he has won caps for England at under 21 level.

I would have thought if we did pay a fee for Hovarth, it was a modest one, but the deal to bring Scottish midfielder David Turnbull in from Celtic could, reportedly, run to £2 million. Turnbull is an attacking midfielder who I can remember being very impressive for Motherwell as a teenager. There were rumours that we were after him, but they came to nothing and, after early interest from Norwich, he signed for Celtic only for the deal to collapse because of a failed medical. The reason for this was that one of his knees needed operating on and, once that was done, the move to Celtic eventually went through.

On the face of it, Turnbull did well at Celtic with a scoring rate of one in four over a hundred games and he won all of his five Scottish full international caps while with them, but he fails the what do his old club’s fans think of him test, because the verdict from Celtic fans tends to be along the lines of talented, but slow and lazy. I used to think that this was an infallible method of judging new signings, but after the West Brom fans have been proved so wrong about Karlan Grant (he has his faults, but, being lazy, as many Albion fans labelled him, is not one of them), I remain hopeful that this could be a pretty shrewd, if expensive by our recent standards, signing.

Finally, there’s another loan signing in ex Bristol City striker Famara Diedhiou. My misgivings about this one are based almost entirely on the fact that Diedhiou is thirty one, which is a bit unfair really when you consider that’s the same age as Kieffer Moore who I was hoping we would be bringing here (despite the assurances of some in the know merchants on social media that Moore back to Cardiff was a “done deal”, he ended up signing for Ipswich yesterday). It turns out as well that Diedhiou’s scoring record while at Ashton Gate was virtually identical to Moore’s in the games he has played at this level, but it should be noted that the twenty seven times capped Senegalese international was between the ages of twenty four and twenty eight when he was with the wurzels and they are reckoned by many to be the sort of ages when a player is at his peak.

What seems obvious is that Diedhiou will be our number one striking choice for the rest of the season and I’d say he is one of a group who have helped lift the mood around Cardiff City in recent days. Of course, it’s what happens out on the pitch which really matters and that will be the final arbiter of how good or bad our window has been, but the five newcomers do look like an improvement on the five I listed at the start who have left the first team squad.

It’s no great surprise that there were plenty of City fans who were saying that the best bit of news to emerge yesterday was that Aaron Ramsey would be back in the squad tomorrow after nearly five months out with injury.

Anyway, we finally get to the main purpose of this piece, the quiz! Here’s seven Watford related questions with the answers to be posted on here on Sunday.

60s. Despite being born south of the river in Streatham, this striker was, due to his father’s connection with the club, a fan of non league insects very much to the north of the Thames as a boy and he signed for them as his first club where his captain described him as;-

“A very gifted centre forward, lean and so quick but unusually with a sharp brain to go with it! He would take a row with a centre half in his stride and yet out-think his opponent, and he was incredibly fit too”

During his time with his first club he also worked as a fishmonger in Billingsgate market, but his goal a game scoring exploits always made it likely bigger clubs would come calling and, when they did, he moved a fairly short distance to the First Division. Although that may have been a step too far for him at that stage in his career, he did manage a goal every other game for a while at his new club and this persuaded Watford to sign him, but he didn’t stay too long – his goal scoring record, while perfectly acceptable by today’s standards, was the worst it got during his career and so he moved out of London for the first time to sign for a club very much on the rise at the time and helped them reach the top flight before a move west for a couple of seasons before a Christmas time retirement.

His goalscoring record at club level could be described as prolific, but he was even more so in international football as seventeen appearances produced sixteen goals, who am I describing?

70s. Although his name may have suggested it, there was nothing corny about this Londoner’s career as a solid goalscorer who just came up short when it came to top flight quality. He never played a first team game while wearing hoops, but then established himself at Watford over five years, before a move to red birds where his exploits persuaded a club that had fallen on hard times to give him a chance. He did okay at what was undoubtedly the biggest club he played for, but, once they started to climb again, he was off back where he came from again for what was the best spell of his career in goalscoring terms. His next two moves took him close to a couple of different borders, but he was in decline now and his final move involved a trip to the seaside not too far from the Football League’s headquarters, can you name the player being described?

80s. Did Watford attract trolls in this decade? Aye! (3,6)

90s. Can you name the former England international with an odd surname when you consider that he’s barely been outside of London during his long playing and managerial career, who had a spell with Watford in the first half of this decade?

00s. His first game in senior professional football came nineteen years ago for Watford against a side that included Gavin Gordon on the substitute’s bench and he greeted 2024 by receiving the fifth red card of his career, name him.

10s. Which Watford player of this decade has called for footballers to earn less and pay more taxes, urged young people to vote in the 2019 General Election while using a hash tag #F*ckBoris and is the second biggest share holder in Forest Green Rovers?

20s. Which Watford player, who was still with them during this decade, was a one time club record signing who made his international debut in a game at the Hive, Barnet which also saw new City signing Famara Diedhiou featuring for the opposition?

Watford answers

60s. Bobby Brown started his career with Barnet before a move to Fulham in 1960. Brown had been an amateur until his move to Watford a year later was the signal to join the paid ranks. Brown was next transferred to Northampton, who were climbing from Fourth Division to First and then back down again. Brown stayed long enough to help hem into the First Division, but then moved to City for £15,000 before he suffered an injury in a Boxing Day win over Aston Villa in 1967 at Ninian Park which ended his career. Brown won fourteen caps for England’s amateur team, scoring twelve times in the process, while his three appearances for Great Britain in the 1960 Olympics produced another four.

70s. Alan Mayes moved to Watford from QPR and then to Swindon before he spent here years with Chelsea in the early eighties. Returning to Swindon, Mayes enjoyed his best spell as a goalscorer, before a short spell (which included a loan move to Newport) with Carlisle and then a season at Blackpool.

80s. Les Taylor.

90s. Alan Devonshire.

00s. Adrian Mariappa’s first appearance in senior football was in Watford’s 3-1 win over Notts County in the League Cup in August 2005. Mariappa’s last game was for Salford against Forest Green Rovers on 6 January when he was dismissed for being shown two yellow cards.

10s. Hector Bellerin.

20s. Isaac Success.

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