A great send off for Cardiff City’s player of the twenty first century.

Posted on December 1, 2022 by The other Bob Wilson

It’s strange how it seems like we’ve been living with Covid on our shores for ages and yet it seems like only yesterday when the way, way too soon death of the great Peter Whittingham was announced and yet the UK first went into lockdown on 23 March 2020 some five days after Whitts’ passing from head injuries suffered on 7 March was confirmed.

So, it’s been a long time for a formal recognition by the club of someone who all but the very youngest or newest City fan will have such fond memories of in the blue shirt to take place.

The blame for this can be put almost entirely on the aforesaid Covid, but, finally, a memorial match for Whitts was played last night between City and his first club Aston Villa in front of what I’d say was a good sized crowd of 10,027 at Cardiff City Stadium. With the distraction of the World Cup and it being the last night of November with temperatures taking a dip from the almost balmy weather of recent weeks in the last few days, that seems a good turn out to me and special praise goes to the six hundred Villa fans who made the trip down from the Midlands.

A couple of Whitts’ former team mates arrived from outside the UK to honour him. Aron Gunnarsson from Qatar and Steve McPhail from Ireland, while others came from around the UK including Roger Johnson, Matt Connolly and David Marshall and the man who signed him for City, Dave Jones, was also there – apologies to those I’ve not mentioned.

All proceeds from the game went towards the PW7 Foundation .

As for the match itself, the last similar type game for a long serving City player was the one held for Kevin McNaughton held in March 2017 which was between his team and one selected by Craig Bellamy. There are two types of testimonial game in my experience, there’s the light hearted one where everyone has a bit of a jolly with “guest” appearances from non players and the McNaughton one fell into that category as his ream ended up winners after a penalty shoot out following a 5-5 draw.

Last night was an example of the second type where it was a “proper” game that was played as if it mattered. Obviously, both teams were not at full strength because of World Cup commitments, but, within those confines, the teams were as strong as they could be with Villa including named like Digne, Mings, Young, Buendia, Watkins, Luiz, Ings and Bailey all playing at least forty five minutes.

Although there were some complaints about the timing of the game, it probably helped in some respects because the mid season break for Premier League and Championship clubs may have given the match more importance in terms of fitness and preparedness for the resumption of fixtures which comes a week on Saturday for City and on Boxing Day for Villa.

So, if I had to come up with a measure of the intensity at which the game was played, I’d go for the last pre season game a week before the proper stuff starts – it wasn’t like a league game, but the outcome seemed to matter to both teams.

For City, the absence of Rubin Colwill, Mark Harris and Callum Robinson left gaps in their squad up front and so they started with Gavin Whyte, Ollie Tanner and Kion Etete as a front three. Given our scoring record this season. It was hard to imagine City scoring unless it became one of those light hearted testimonials I mentioned earlier, but it turned out that they need no help in scoring – all three of the makeshift front line did well, especially Tanner and Etete.

Tanner and Etete probably attracted more comment than most of our seventeen summer signings, but, with Tanner finding the transition from non league part timer to full time pro the test that most in his position would do and Etete hit by an injury which kept him out for about six weeks, they’ve almost become forgotten men as the weeks went by.

However, both of them did not look out of place against Premier League opposition and Etete especially will have not done his first team prospects any harm at all.

Tanner had already done a few good things when City gained possession deep inside Villa’s half on forty minutes and the former Lewes player made ground down the left before hitting a low shot from fifteen yards across the keeper and into the corner of the net.

With City bringing on a new keeper and defence at half time and Villa making changes which, if anything, left their side stronger than it had been, that single goal lead seemed almost irrelevant. However, when a smooth build up saw Neils Nkounkou put in a neat low cross on fifty three minutes, Etete finished in impressive fashion with a first time effort from around the penalty spot.

Although the lack of meetings between the two teams down the years has played a large part in this stat, I make it that Villa had not scored a goal against City in Cardiff since December 1974 and Jak Alnwick will probably swear that they shouldn’t have scored tonight as he claimed a foul by Jacob Ramsey in the act of him heading in Luiz’s corner four minutes after Etete’s goal.

City brought on youngsters James Crole, Joel Colwill, Caleb Hughes and Morgan Wigley in the last half an hour and it was the last named who made the most impressive single contribution of the four on seventy three minutes with a quick and powerful run down the left and a fine cross which the unmarked Etete headed in from six yards.

City played some nice stuff and deserved their 3-1 win as, from their perspective anyway. They achieved a treble in honouring a fine player and getting a win to send them into the second part of the campaign in good heart while also having a group of younger players advance their cause in a competitive, if not “official” game.

The only slight disappointing feature for me was that the match would have been an ideal opportunity to give Ebou Adams and Isaak Davies their first game time of the season, but their absence suggests that they’re still not ready to play yet. That said, there is an Under 21 game against Wolves on Saturday afternoon, so maybe they were being kept back for that

Just to go back to Whitts to finish, I took the easy option in the title I gave this piece because I honestly cannot make a case for anyone else being City’s best player of this century, but could I have said he was our best player ever?

It’s probably impossible to make a judgement like that when you’re talking about anything that’s been going longer than the human life span and this is even more true when you consider that there are very few, if any, moving pictures of City’s best players of the 1920s out there.

However, I’d ask any one who is considering the question of who is City’s best player to have a look at this video of almost every league goal Whitts scored for us . From memory, there was a scruffy goal in a win at Norwich, the one he got in the 2-1 win over Leicester in the game Gabor Gyepes got sent off in would win no awards for style, but, apart from that, it seems all his goals which weren’t penalties would be called beauties if they had been scored by anyone else – the man really did do what he wanted.

Posted in Out on the pitch | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Wales out with the only saving grace being that at least City’s Rubin Colwill got some game time.

Posted on November 30, 2022 by The other Bob Wilson

So, after the sixty four year wait, all of the build up, all of the hype and all of the optimism, Wales went out of the World Cup tonight with what, I’m afraid, was a whimper, beaten 3-0 by an England team which didn’t have to play that well to register a win which has left me slightly relieved that it wasn’t worse for us.

Wales’ World Cup campaign lasted eight ignominious days and, although no one would have thought it at the time, the high spot was the forty five minutes which followed a woeful first half against the USA. For short periods of that second half against the Americans we looked like the side we can be, but, there’s no two ways about this, Wales have been one of the worst teams in this competition (in fact, I’d only rate Qatar as being worse at the moment).

I take no pleasure in saying that and I think it’s important not to totally lose track of just what this squad has achieved in getting to this tournament. However, I think it’s also important that we don’t slip into “plucky little Wales” mode and try to make out that it was only ever about ending that long almost three score years and ten wait for World Cup football.

The fact is that, whereas we’ve played two Euros and another World Cup and definitely looked like we belonged on such a stage with the first two (the results clearly indicated that we did in 1958 as well), we’ve looked out of our depth here with even the one point we gained not really being deserved.

I asked a messageboard question yesterday asking whether Wales were crap, under-performing or a mixture of both? Attempting to answer it, I said it was a mixture of both with the balance more towards under-performing, but having had another thirty six hours and tonight’s game to reflect further on it, I’m even more in favour of it mainly being that we’ve under-performed.

Gareth Bale was withdrawn at half time tonight after again contributing very little (Rob Page said it was because of a hamstring injury). Given what he’s done for his country over more than a decade and a half now, I can understand the thinking which says that Bale might come up with something no one else on the pitch could produce in a minute, but logic, and the evidence of your own eyes, tells you the reality of the situation.

I remember that Scotland game at Cardiff City Stadium in the pouring rain which Bale won with a stunning shot two minutes from time. That was ten years ago last month and I’d say that was around the time Gareth Bale was at his absolute peak, but the truth has to be that even that Bale ( the one which was, in my opinion, the third best player in the world for a few years) would have struggled to do much in this World Cup if he had played as little football in the two years leading up to the tournament as the current one has.

So, in a way, Bale hasn’t really under-performed to that great an extent in these last three games when you consider the evidence of the last year or two. Much the same applies to Aaron Ramsey who played the full ninety minutes tonight, but, again, was completely unable to reproduce a Turkey type performance from nearly eighteen months ago when he was able to dispel the sort of doubts he is facing now.

No, the under-performance has mainly come from the younger, fitter, members of the squad and, after watching the three games, I think anyone who has played a significant amount of time (say thirty minutes) during them are kidding themselves if they say they’re satisfied with their personal contribution to this competition..

I genuinely cannot pick a Welsh player of the tournament, I’d offer Ethan Ampadu, Keiffer Moore, Chris Mepham and Joe Rodon as candidates only because I think they had spells in games where they played well, but none of them were able to maintain that form over any sort of concerted period or from one game to the next.

That is the real shame of this sorry campaign, the squad as a whole did not do itself justice. Granted, I think the conditions were tough in at least one of the matches and there was proof from the quality of the opposition that the World Cup is a step up from the Euros, but we’ve looked unfit, slow and disorganized compared to most other sides and I’m not sure there’s another team in the competition that has passed the ball worse than us.

Rob Page was full of praise for his players after the game. I suppose he always was going to be, but does he really think his team were “outstanding” in the first half when, in a game they had to win, they defended in depth, sometimes a little luckily, to keep the scoresheet blank?

No, for me, Rob Page, who I think had done a decent job as manager beforehand and so wasn’t surprised when he was offered a new contract, has had a bit of a nightmare in this tournament and I’d say he’s now in need of a strong start to the qualification process for the next Euros when they begin in March.

It’s been hard to figure out what the plan has been tactically in the last three games and, although I appreciate that there’s not been time to get much meaningful coaching and fitness work done, I do wonder whether a coaching hierarchy consisting of three centrebacks (Messrs Page, Symons and Knill) is really the best way to go?

England’s goals came from a Marcus Rashford free kick on fifty minutes and within another minute, Phil Foden made it two before Rashford got the third with about twenty minutes left from a shot which Danny Ward should have saved. Meanwhile, the USA took the second qualification place by beating Iran 1-0, so they’ll face the Netherlands in the last sixteen, with England having a tricky looking test against Senegal.

One final plus point to finish on when it comes to Wales, Rubin Colwill came on for the last ten minutes of tonight’s game to at least get some playing experience from the tournament. About half an hour before kick off, I heard Nathan Blake strongly implying that Colwill’s club were making a mess of his development and, although City would say that there are valid reasons why that’s happened this season, I’d agree that his club career has virtually stood still for eighteen months.

Now, in a side facing a real relegation scrap in the second half of the season, a side that’s main weakness is clearly a lack of goals, Colwill has to surely be a starter most weeks for City. In a team crying out for a proper number ten (not Joe Ralls Andy Rinomhota or Sheyi Ojo!), the fact his club have resolutely failed to play him in that position is a real head scratcher. I’m pretty certain that we’ll score goals at a better rate for the rest of the season if Colwill becomes a far bigger part of our attacking play, but, for that to happen, timid City managers have got to accept that this might mean that a few more may be conceded along the way.

Finally, City’s under 18s were 2-0 winners over Bristol City at Leckwith on Saturday with Gabriele Biancheri scoring a goal in either half.

Posted in The kids., Wales | Tagged , | 3 Comments