Football gets it completely wrong.

Posted on September 10, 2022 by The other Bob Wilson

Within two minutes of the Queen’s death being announced on Thursday, I posted the following on the City messageboard I use most;-

I”’ve no time for Royalty, but I always said that if we had to have a Monarch, she was a pretty good one.

It’s strange, she’s been there all of my life – don’t really know what to think now she’s gone, but I hope she rests in peace, she deserves that.”

That was an immediate reaction to the news, since then I’ve grown heartily sick of the wall to wall coverage that we’ve had from the mainstream media about the Queen’s death. It’s always the same with any sort of royal event. There’s never an acknowledgment that the fawning, reverential coverage may not reflect what a significant proportion of the country may be feeling – in this case, the BBC especially may be fearful of what sort of reaction any change of tone may provoke from the sections of the print media, all of which were more than willing to hammer Queen Elizabeth and her family twenty five years ago in the wake of Princess Diana’s death.

Anyway, I digress, back to the Queen and the reaction to her death. That comment I made on Thursday evening still holds true – I have an issue with the institution the Queen represented, but none really with her and now I would just like a return to some sort of normality in life.

There was a chance of that with Cardiff City due to entertain Hull City today, but that’s been taken away now by what I believe to be a shocking and ludicrous decision by the sport’s authorities to, effectively, ban the game over this weekend – bafflingly though, it appears that it’s okay to play some forms of junior football in some parts of the UK.

Now, my reaction there may read as being extreme, but allow me to develop my argument. For a start, let’s be clear about this, the UK Government’s guidance for the period of mourning which had been declared following the Queen’s death advises that cancelling fixtures was not obligatory but up to individual sports (taken from stories like this one ). So, the Government, and, by implication, the Royal Family have no objection to sport events taking place during the period of mourning.

As a result of this, various other sports have decided to continue as normal this weekend. For example, I’ll be able to watch the England v South Africa test cricket match at the Oval today as that’s being played over the next three days following a show of respect with the cancellation of yesterday’s play. Similarly, the BMW PGA tournament will restart today as a fifty four hole event, while horse racing (the sport closest to the Queen’s heart) will resume tomorrow with the running of the St. Leger. Bizarrely, the Bristol v Bath rugby game which was postponed last night as a mark of respect will be able to go ahead today as part of a full Premiership fixture list because the banning of football means that the Bristol City match scheduled for Ashton Gate is not being played now! Other examples include the Great Northern Run going ahead as planned and full programmes of Rugby League and Ice Hockey (meaning there will be some professional sport going ahead in Cardiff this weekend) fixtures proceeding as normal.

Football though decided to jump in before all of these sports bar horse racing I believe by unilaterally calling the weekend’s games off (and there’s no confirmation yet that matches scheduled for midweek in the days ahead and then the following weekend’s games will proceed either). This goes directly against the most recent precedent set by a death of a Monarch.

While I appreciate it’s a long time ago now, when the Queen’s father, King George the sixth died on 6 February 1952 (that was a Wednesday), football was still played three days later on the Saturday with City losing 4-2 to Sheffield Wednesday in the old Division Two at Hillsborough in front of a crowd of 42,867, which was about fifteen hundred up on Wednesday’s average home crowd that season. So, on the face of it, there was little or no “protest vote” from fans who decided not to attend because playing football a few days after the King’s death was “disrespectful”.

Yet, the message sent out by the current football authorities is suggestive of a line of thinking that their predecessors from seventy years ago were being disrespectful by not cancelling fixtures. Indeed, their decision implies that the sports which are going ahead as normal are being disrespectful despite the official guidance appearing to indicate that this is not so.

Although I understand the decision of Royal Mail workers and the RMT to cancel their latest strikes in the light of the Queen’s passing, it is ridiculous that, on one hand, you have one set of employees being told they have to go to work and another, albeit far richer, set of employees being told they can’t work because the Queen has died!

I was around in the fifties, but I’m too young to remember anything about them now. However, from what I’ve read and seen of that decade, I find it very hard to believe that anti Monarchy feelings were stronger then than they are now, so why the feeling, which appears to exist in the top echelons in football at least, that they were getting it wrong in the fifties?

I can’t answer that, but I can point to a modern development which appears to come from a belief that sometimes a minute’s silence to mark the passing of an individual or group of people is not sufficient, it has to be two minutes. What’s all that about? One minute is perfectly adequate and has been since the first official instance of this method of remembrance in 1912, yet some modern thinking appears to believe that this is not enough – why?

Now, to bring this around to Cardiff City to finish, I have heard it said, that not playing this weekend is probably a good thing because of the reaction of some fans to any minute (or two) of silence before the game. I would argue that, on the contrary, putting things off (there’s bound to be a period of silence pre game whenever City play again) makes it more likely that it will not be observed by all.

On a purely selfish note as well, City will not now have a home game in September and there have been examples on messageboards of exiled supporters who were making trips to Cardiff to watch a rare home game for them who are going to be out of pocket now because of this pointless postponement (I’m sure stories like that have been repeated at clubs up and down the land)- I just hope that those responsible who are in elected positions pay for it come their next election time.

Posted in General football stuff | 2 Comments

Seven decades of Cardiff City v Hull City matches.

Posted on September 8, 2022 by The other Bob Wilson

I’ll start with a short round up of recent games played by City’s age group and women’s teams and what is probably the best night, so far, in the history of the Welsh women’s team.

Anyone who has been waiting on the outcome of the cliffhanger from last Saturday that was Coventry v Cardiff Under 18s which was left at 3-1 to Coventry at half time before Twitter communication with darkest Warwickshire was lost, won’t be pleased to learn that it ended up 5-1 to the home side. The goals from the game can be seen on the club website now if you really want to watch them, although, at the risk of sounding old fogeyish, you’ll need to be made of stern stuff to make it to the end of the three minutes given the truly appalling musical backing to the video.

City’s women’s team began their league season on Sunday with a 2-0 win over Pontypridd United at Leckwith thanks to goals by Danielle Broadhurst and Phoebe Poole. The following day there was a notable win for the Under 21s who went to Wigan and beat a team containing seven players (one of them was Joe Bennett) with first team experience 2-1 – Jack Leahy scored the first as he was presented with the ball some twenty yards out by a keeper trying to play out from the back and netted easily, then captain Xavier Benjamin headed a last minute winner from a Caleb Hughes corner. Once again, highlights of both games are available on the club website, this time without that bloody awful music.

There’ve been bigger crowds for women’s games in Wales (e.g at the Millennium Stadium in the 2012 Olympics and for the 2017 Champions League Final at Cardiff City Stadium) than the twelve and a half thousand who turned up on Tuesday to watch the national team make it through to the Play Offs for the World Cup to be held in Australia and New Zealand next year, but I believe this was the largest for a game involving a team from this country.

Wales’ opponents Slovenia needed to win to pip us for the Play Off place and, in the first half the home team felt the absence through injury of their best player Jess Fishlock and were a little lucky to still be level at the break. Wales, inspired by Carrie Jones, who only turned nineteen last weekend, were much improved after the break and I’d say were slightly the better team over the ninety minutes. Thankfully, the otherwise impressive centreback, Gemma Evans did not have reason to regret her bad miss when she made s poor contact with a free header from about five yards out from a corner and directed the ball straight at the goalkeeper.

The match finished 0-0, but a mixture of the tension of the occasion and the fact that both sides were trying to win the game made for an entertaining spectacle. The qualifying procedure is long and complicated (far too complicated for me to explain!), but Wales will know what they need to do next to keep their interest alive tomorrow when the draw for the next phase is held.

Monday also saw Middlesbrough beat Sunderland 1-0, thereby dumping us into the bottom three, before Saturday’s visit from a Hull side which has hit a rough patch following a promising first four matches. The Tigers have conceded eight in their last two away games, so you’d like to think that the chances are there for us to improve our pitiful scoring record while also, hopefully, starting to climb the table again, but we really do need to score the first goal because our reaction to going behind this season has left much to be desired.

Anyway, on to the quiz – here’s the usual seven questions dating back to the sixties with the answers being a Hull player from that time in each instance – I’ll post the answers on Sunday.

60s. Another of what, sadly, is an increasing number of former footballers whose death has been attributed to their time in the game. The coroner at his inquest ruled that death was “caused by his occupation as a footballer, heading heavy footballs”. A midfielder, he did not have to move too far from home when signing for his first club which still has a unique pre match tradition relating to one of their nicknames which carries on to the present day I understand. He had to wait for his move to Hull to play any first team football however and became a fairly frequent opponent of City’s during his time with the Humberside club, only tasting defeat the once.

After close to two hundred appearances in all competitions during his six years at Hull, he moved on for three years as an antlered beast during which time he only made twelve league appearances. Capped three times by his country, he worked as a quantity surveyor after his retirement from the game, can you name him?

70s. A Hull player at the time, he is credited with being the last ever true amateur to play league football and a dozen years later, he is said to have saved a life during what was a football disaster? Who?

80s. A Hull midfielder from this decade, I’ve seen him described as a “midfield dynamo”, well, if he was, he was a crooked one! Name him.

90s. A olde clinic transformed into Hull point winner at Ninian Park. (5,6)

00s. Uncle suffering from bone condition maybe?

10s. Twice on the losing side for Hull against City in a season during this decade, he was to experience penalty shoot out heartbreak in a Wembley Cup Final during the following campaign – what is it that makes that story a bit different in this case though?

20s. This midfielder was playing for a club which has an artificial pitch when he was, tentatively, linked with us. He never came here, but signed for another club that wore blue. However, it soon became clear that a new, high profile manager didn’t fancy him and so he was loaned out, first, to an updated glade and then to capital greens, before securing a permanent move to Hull where he was a title winner in his first season. Who is he?

Answers

60s. Wrexham born Alan Jarvis signed for Everton as a teenager (where the “toffee lady” still throws black and white humbugs into the crowd at Goodison Park pre match apparently). He moved to Hull in 1964 and gained his first Welsh cap a couple of years later. Jarvis left Hull for Mansfield in 1970, but saw little first team action for them before retiring three years later.

70s. John Hawley played as an amateur for a while after breaking into the Hull team in 1973. Twelve years later, he was playing for Bradford City at the time of the Valley Parade fire and is said to have saved the life of a spectator by pulling him to safety from the flames.

80s. Billy Askew.

90s. Colin Alcide.

00s. Sam Ricketts.

10s. Anthony Gerrard was still a City player when he appeared for Hull in a couple of 2-0 defeats by us in 10/11. Gerrard was part of a loan deal swap between City and Hull which saw him going to them and Seyi Olofinjana  joining us. Strangely, both clubs were happy to have their own player appear against them during the season (Olofinjana played and scored in the first game between the teams, but was not involved in the return fixture). Both players returned to their parent clubs for the 11/12 season and, in fact, it was Gerrard who missed the last penalty in City’s shoot out defeat by Liverpool in the 2012 League Cup Final.

20s. Greg Docherty was linked with us and a number of other Championship clubs as a youngster when he first broke into the Hamilton Academicals team, but he opted to remain in Scotland and signed for Rangers. Docherty was made available for loan by Steve Gerrard when he arrived at Ibrox Park and he had spells with Shrewsbury and Hibs before he signed permanently for Hull in 2020.

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