Weekly update 11 June 2023 – club finally issue their retained list.

Posted on June 11, 2023 by The other Bob Wilson

After the excitement brought about by the appointment of our new manager, it’s been another quiet week for Cardiff City although there were a few developments on Friday after most of the seven days had been taken up speculating as to the identity of the player the club had agreed to sign before the appointment of Erol Bulut was confirmed.

Mr Bulut met the media for the first time on Monday and I thought he created a pretty good impression- I was particularly pleased to hear our new manager single out our poor home form as something he wants to see an improvement in.

However, the star of the show for me was Chairman Mehmet Dalman who was as impressive as I’ve ever seen him as he did his bit to counteract the common charge from the likes of me that the top dogs at the club do not understand the game.

I’d remarked after previous meetings he’d appeared at that our Chairman was surprisingly frank in his opinion of the club’s owner at times and that continued here. In particular, the moment when he said that Mr Tan really did know about football which was accompanied, with very good timing, by a knowing look which drew laughter from the assembled hacks drew plenty of comment – the implication that he did not mean what he had just said seemed obvious.

I say “seemed”, because there has to be the chance that the relationship between owner and Chairman is so strong that it can survive some pretty direct, to put it mildly, sounding comments from one towards the other. Maybe it was all a joke, but I know what is the more likely option to me.

CEO Ken Choo was also present and he and the Chairman were asked how many season tickets were on sale this summer. It seems there was some sort of misunderstanding at this stage because both men sought clarification from other club employees and the answer 18,000 was given (the club’s on line ticket feature indicates that figure is nearer the twenty to twenty one thousand mark).

 Mr Choo was then asked how many did he expect to be sold. At the time, the tickets sold figure was just over 11,000 (a better figure than I was expecting to be sold all summer if I’m being honest) and he replied 14,000 – the Chairman was more bullish and went for 18,000 with a comment that some things he and Erol Bulut would be saying during the summer would excite fans.

Mr Dalman had also said that agreement had been reached regarding a transfer and he appeared to be on the brink of identifying the player concerned when he told to keep it quiet for now by Mr Choo.

People have taken this exchange as meaning that the player we’ve, apparently, signed is someone who will help carry the season tickets sold figure to the 18,000 mark mentioned by Mr Dalman. The fact that Mr Choo must, surely, know who the mystery player is and was still predicting only 14,000 sold suggests that our new man will not be a star name that will send those season ticket sold figures soaring.

However, with the current ticket sold figure now close to 13,000, I’d say that there’s only one player who might be available to us, with our transfer embargo, capable of persuading around 5,000 to purchase a season ticket and he is an illustrious old boy of ours.

I was a little surprised to learn that Aaron Ramsey had started most of his current team Nice’s post World Cup games despite the tournament not going well for the man who is now Wales’ captain. Ramsey had been a sub for most of the pre World Cup matches he’d been fit enough to be part of for his club, but he had enough appearances overall to trigger a clause which meant he’d automatically be offered another contract by Nice.

Although Nice’s retained list showed that Ramsey had not been released by the club, there have been media stories claiming that the midfielder wants a two year contract, while Nice are only prepared to offer a one year deal.

If this was true, then it may open the door to City coming in with a two year contract offer of their own and then the prospect of Ramsey coming here starts to look a possibility.

After the Gareth Bale saga of last summer however, I’m going to leave it at that unless or until Ramsey has signed for us – I wasted my time last week typing a thousand words plus welcoming a manager who never turned up, so that’s me finished on Ramsey until next week’s Wales games at least!

Any other transfer speculation I’ve seen seems half hearted to me and with the manager settling in, you get the feeling things are on hold for what is hopefully a short while.

That’s what happened with City’s pre season preparations. Apparently, a series of practice games and a training trip to the Algarve were pencilled in to be announced at Monday’s media conference, but Erol Bulut wanted to give them the once over before okaying the proposals. Since then, there has been confirmation of one game – City will be the opposition for Wycombe Wanderers in Joe Jacobson’s well deserved Testimonial game at Adams Park on 29 July. The under 21 team’s pre season programme has also been announced and features games against the equivalent teams of Premier League sides Villa and Luton.

The other Friday announcement was the revelation of the club’s retained list (it looks like we are going to have to get used to waiting until we’re well into June to see them from now on). To be honest, it was a bit of a non event with no real surprises at senior level – I’m glad to see that Mark Harris, Joel Bagan and Eli King have all been offered contracts mind. Of the younger players, Owen Pritchard, Aidan MacNamara and Taylor Jones can all feel a little unlucky with the first named in particular being unfortunate given that he was injured for much of last season.

One last thing, Erol Bulut said on Monday that he expected to bring in three members of staff he’s worked with previously , while current coach Dean Whitehead is expected to join Watford shortly. As for Sol Bamba, there will be discussions as to whether the man brought in to be Sabri Lamouchi’s Assistant will be staying with City – as it seems like one of the newcomers the manager wants to bring in would work as his assistant, Sol would probably have a new job title if he were to stay.

Posted in Out on the pitch, The stiffs | 5 Comments

Daily update 4 June 2023 – Erol Bulut anyone?

Posted on June 4, 2023 by The other Bob Wilson

If I was a paranoid type, I’d be accusing the decision makers at Cardiff City tonight of having read the piece I did this morning talking as if the appointment of Vitor Campelos as our new manager was a done deal and decided that they’d embarrass me by naming someone else as the man in charge some five hours later!

In fact, I would not only be paranoid, but I’d also have a heavily inflated view of my own importance. However, although I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory this morning, I did get one thing right – I said not many, if any, City fans would have known of the existence of Vitor Campelos before Thursday and I think the same is true of our new manager. Furthermore, I don’t think they would have heard of him until this lunchtime when the BBC and Wales Online websites carried stories about the appointment followed about an hour later by a confirmation on the club website.

There’s a Tweet posted today by the journalist who operates under the name Roath Boy saying that he’d spoken to Chairman Mehmet Dalman who’d told him that the club’s number one target had been offered a job by a Bundesliga club and that he guaranteed that Roath Boy would not have heard of him.

I said that there may be a few real nerds among the City fanbase that had heard of Vitor Campelos and I reckon that applies moreso to Erol Bulut who is our new manager having turned down that Bundesliga club for us it seems.

I’m definitely not among those who will have heard about Bulut beforehand, so I’m like many others who are going to his rather brief Wikipedia page to get some information about him, but you only have to look at one of the clubs he has managed to feel that his name may be better known to some supporters of the club than Campelos’ was.

There’s not much more I can add about our new manager besides what appears on his Wikipedia page, but I can’t say I’m too enamoured with what I’ve read about him from people who claim to know how Bulut’s teams play. Apparently, at his last club, the average age of the team was nearly thirty, he favours a high pressing game, is prepared to let the opposition have most of the ball and specializes in low scoring and pretty dull games (he is reported to have said that the opposition had all of the ball, but we ended up with the points after a game). Some of that reads like Neil Warnock, but does Bulut have the man management skills that help make Warnock a success at this level in the short term at least?

Given that most of this inside track information came from Twitter, I’m sure there are many who will feel that I’m placing too much store in something they wouldn’t give the time of day too. In truth though, I’m not paying too much attention to what is being said about Bulut on social media – he deserves to be analysed tactically with an open mind when we start playing our warm up and early season games.

The truth is that, as a Cardiff fan, I’ve become very good at recognizing teams that prefer not to have the ball and feed off opposition mistakes while playing a type of game that is not easy on the eye – if Bulut sends out his side to play that way, I’ll know soon enough that all that is being offered is more of the same, mostly unsuccessful, fare that we’ve been watching for most of the past ten years and more.

. To counteract the last three paragraphs to some extent, I could make a guess that, based on his pretty extensive experience of Futsal, Erol Bulut is someone who places a lot of store on the technical side of the game, but there’s no guarantee that I’d be right in thinking that, so, as I say, it’s probably best to just wait and see.

Moving on, you would think that having managed a club as big as Fenerbache and having, apparently, turned down a job in the Bundesliga to come here, Bulut is going to be on fair whack at Cardiff.

Despite a general acceptance among supporters that we’re skint this summer, the club are presenting Bulut as being a step up in class from recent City managers – it’s being reported that “the boat was pushed out” by the club opting for Bulut (incidentally it’s been reported that the other names on City’s four man shortlist for the job were Nathan Jones and Oscar Garcia who I spoke about in this morning’s piece plus our former player and son of John, Cameron Toshack who was a well regarded Academy coach at Swansea and worked as an assistant to Jesse Marsch at Leeds).

Vincent Tan has talked about how he thinks that having a manager like Bulut at Cardiff will mean that better players will be more willing to sign for us because of the manager’s reputation.

Just what has Bulut done to earn the sort of reputation City clearly think he has though? I suppose his greatest single achievement has been taking his second club Alanyaspor to their first ever Turkish Cup Final, but, despite not lasting a full season at Fenerbache, that club were having their best season in seven years under his management and he had a decent record at Gaziantep, his last club, despite their financial problems and the effects of the serious earthquake that hit Turkey earlier this year.

I used the word “intriguing” to describe the reported Campelos appointment and I think the same applies to Erol Bulut who will be giving his first press conference on Monday. However, even if he really is an improvement on what we’ve had lately it seems to me that he’ll have to do a couple of things if we are not to go through a repeat of what we saw in the season just ended.

First, Bulut will need to get more out of the club’s younger players than we saw in 22/23 and, secondly, he will quickly need to identify the areas where we need improvement and put the theory that he can attract better players to the club to the test straight away.

Posted in Down in the dugout | Tagged | 9 Comments