Could this team have changed the way Cardiff play and saved Vincent Tan some money?

Posted on December 29, 2020 by The other Bob Wilson

My piece on the Brentford game brought about what I’ve called a challenging response from someone who I’ve known for a long time and has been a strong supporter of this blog – here is what he wrote;-

““Inferiority complex” etc – it’s value judgement. This retrospective banging on about the money that has been wasted may syphon off some of your frustrations, but is it ‘on’ the money? Tell us the player(s) you know would have made the difference you crave, who would have come here, who were available at a price we could afford (by what measure) and/or whose parent clubs would have loaned us, whom Harris missed the opportunity therefore to bring in. The emphasis being on ‘you know’. “Tease us, Bob! Tease us!” as Delboy would say.”

It’s a reasonable response to the sort of stuff you tend to get from people who write blogs on their football team in that there is usually plenty of talk about what is wrong at the club concerned and precious little about how it could be put right!

The person concerned posts under the name Royalewithcheese and is right to a degree to think I’m being critical of our manager lately because I believe his strange reluctance to add to the central midfielders he was left by Neil Warnock is costing us. It also seems odd that, having pushed for five subs to be reintroduced, he appears to be reluctant to use them, the style of play under him is not much more easy on the eye than it was under Neil Warnock and I found it depressing that he could think that we were “excellent” in the first half on Saturday, despite us not having a single attempt on the Brentford goal until the forty eighth minute of the first half.

However, despite this, I’m not really in the Neil Harris out camp. In fact, I think that, his non action on central midfielders and lack of cover at right back apart, he did well in the last transfer window and has been unlucky with injuries to two of his better signings. So short of suggesting a Barry Bannan type (he’s too old now for me), I’ve no real names to come up with to answer Royales’ question because I think the issue goes deeper than that.

I believe it’s the type of players we’ve signed in the past ten years or so which have played a part in creating a squad that, it seems, can only achieve consistent results when using the method of play our manager is supposedly trying to move away from which is the problem. I see this as dragging us down to the extent that, although there are welcome signs of some progress lately, we’ve largely been unable to incorporate youngsters who have been brought up to play in a completely different way from the senior team into the squad.

Now you can call me a liar if you want, but I’m being sincere when I say that the team I’m going set out now consisting entirely of players who were playing at what I think most would accept was a lower level than us at the time I saw them might have matched the promotions of 2013 and 2018, cost Vincent Tan a fair bit less to assemble, made him more money in sales and been adaptable enough to have enabled us to have more than just the one way of playing.

I saw all of these players at an early stage of their careers and thought they could do a job for City – see what you think of the side;-

Dan Bentley (Bristol City)

I saw him play for Southend at Newport in October 2013 (there’s a piece on the match here) and, apart from one howler which produced a goal, he was superb in a side that ended up being over run. In 2016, Bentley signed for Brentford for £1.1 million in compensation, but I would like to think he would have cost less than that if we’d signed him around the time he played that game at Newport.

Moses Adubajo (Sheffield Wednesday)

He was a stand out player in Russell Slade’s Leyton Orient side which almost made it to the Championship in 2014 and signed for promoted Brentford for £1 million during the summer of that year. Brentford reached the Championship Play Offs in 14/15 and Hull paid £3.5 million for him shortly afterwards. Odebajo was a regular in the Hull side which reached the Premier League in 2016, but the first of two serious injuries which have held his career back meant that he never got to play at that level.

James Tarkowski (Burnley)

I first saw him play for Oldham in a Sky televised match against Preston and he struck me as the best player on the pitch by a distance. Brentford paid just £45,000 for him in 2014 and two years later they sold him to Burnley for eighty times that – capped a couple of times by England.

Alfie Mawson (Fulham)

Yes, I know he could be classed as damaged goods now because he’s had something of a fall from grace, but, at his best at Swansea, he made the England squad. Was playing for Wycombe on loan from Brentford in League Two. he signed for Barnsley on a Bosman in 2015 after turning down a contract offer from Brentford. Within a year, he’d signed for Swansea for a reported fee of £270,000 (I thought it was a fair bit more than that) and Fulham ended up paying almost £20 million for him when he joined them in 2018.

Andy Robertson (Liverpool)

First saw him playing for Dundee United in 2013/14 when we were in the Premier League and I’m sure he would have very been tempted by an offer from us at that time. As it was, he signed for Hull in July 2014 for less than £3 million – Liverpool paid £8 million for him in 2017.

James McArthur (Crystal Palace)

As Hamilton Accies are my favourite Scottish team, I tend to watch them whenever one of their games are televised. He was signed by Premier League Wigan (so he probably wouldn’t have come here) in 2010 for a half a million pounds and cost Palace around £7 million four years later.

John McGinn (Aston Villa)

McGinn could have been bought at an absolute bargain price twice. He was a real stand out player when I first saw him playing for St Mirren in a televised match and couldn’t believe it when I saw him shortly afterwards playing for Hibs. We were in the Premier League when Championship side Aston Villa paid just £2.75 million for him early in the 18/19 season.

Romaine Sawyers (West Brom)

First saw him playing in the League One Play Offs for Walsall in 15/16 and he joined up with his former manager Dean Smith at Brentford on a Bosman a few weeks later, so maybe we wouldn’t have got him even if we were interested. Signed for West Brom in 2019 for a reported £3 million.

Ademola Lookman (RB Leipzig)

Although unlikely, I think there was a chance we could have got him from Charlton early on when he was playing for a side that ended up being relegated in 16/17..

Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa)

Stood out in an Exeter side which were beaten in the League Two Play Off Final in 15/16 and signed for Brentford a year later for just over a million pounds – according to Neil Warnock, he wanted to sign him when he was our manager, but was turned down by the Board, but we could have got him a year earlier.

Kemar Roofe (Rangers)

To be fair, it was a mate who saw him playing for Oxford United against Newport who first brought him to my attention, but a televised appearance by him a few weeks later confirmed his high opinion of him. There has to be a good chance that he would have chosen Leeds over us when he signed for them for around £3.5 million in 2016.

So, that’s it, who knows how that team would have fared in the table, but I reckon it would have cost something like £20 million to assemble given the fees paid for them when they left the clubs I’d first come across them at. Also, with athletic, attack minded full backs, centrebacks capable of playing out from the back, a midfield containing an experienced anchor man, a passer and a goalscoring box to box man and pace and ability up front, this youngish team would have obvious sell on value as long as the club didn’t mess up their development.

It’s only a bit of fun really and, of course, it’s easy to come up with these sort of selections after the event so to speak, but I strongly believe that around eight of that team would have been interested in coming here if we had made a move for them at the right time – as I mentioned in my piece on the Brentford match, it didn’t have to be like this.

Posted in Out on the pitch | Tagged | 8 Comments

The return of the grounds quiz.

Posted on December 28, 2020 by The other Bob Wilson

I had to admit defeat in my efforts to come up with a seven decades quiz for Wycombe Wanderers, so, instead, I’ve put together a picture quiz about grounds where City have played over the Christmas holiday period. Invariably, the matches I’ve based questions on took place in the early years of our time as a Football League club, so to help you along a bit, I’ll say in what decade the game was played. Where possible, the pictures are of the grounds at the time when the games were played, but this has not always been possible and so there are some where the grounds look more modern than they would have done at the time of the match. I’ll indicate whether the clubs concerned still play at the pictured grounds and I should say that there is one where the team concerned are playing an away match, but I just had to include what is a brilliant photo! There are twenty questions and I’ll post the answers on here in a few days time.

1. The match was played in the thirties. This is the team’s current ground.
2. The team no longer play here, having moved from there within the last ten years – this photo was taken at an FA Cup match against the Corinthians in 1929 around the time of the game in question.

. (Photo by Edward G. Malindine/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
3. The team still play here – this picture was taken in the 1980s and the game in question was played in the forties..
4. The team still play here, but the nearby greyhound track has long since disappeared – the date of the photo isn’t known. The match was played in the twenties.
5. The club still play here. The photo was taken in the sixties and it may be that someone who was a prolific scorer against us for another club during this decade was still on the books when the picture was taken. The game took place in the thirties.
6. An easy one I reckon, the club still play here – the picture was taken sometime between the wars and the game was played in the twenties..
7. The club still play at this ground, but it’s been over a decade since we played there in a competitive game. This picture was taken in 1932 which was close to the date of the game in question.
8. This picture was taken during the first game at this ground in 1905. The club still play there (we’ll be paying them a visit later this season and will be looking to complete a double). The game took place in the thirties.
9. The club still play here. The match was played in the twenties and this picture was taken in 1958 – although it’s not true, it feels like we’ve not won up there since then!
10. The club have moved away from this ground in the recent past. This photo was taken in the sixties and the match in question was played in the forties.
11. Another dead easy one I reckon, this picture was taken in the seventies, the club still play here and the game took place in the twenties.
12. This is the photo I mentioned about it being an away match for the team concerned. There is a clue in the lit being worn by one of the sides. This game was played in 1904 in Rio, but the one the question is based on was from the thirties.
13. The match took place in the fifties when this ground was already a fair old age, but the club still play there. This photo was taken in the seventies.
14. This ground is no longer in use and this photo was taken in 1913 before it had a “facelift” which totally transformed it. The game was played in the twenties – we hold a record concerning this ground which will never be broken.
15. Another painting of what a ground looks like today. The club still play there and we have visited the ground within the past five years. The match the question is based on was played in the thirties.
16. The club concerned still play here, but the ground has changed an awful lot since this photo was taken in the twenties, which is the decade when the match in question was played – we lost the last time we played there, but recent visits there have had a habit of finishing all square.
17. The club in question only used this stadium for one season in the thirties and it so happens City were the Christmas visitors that year – we last faced this team in the noughties, but it does seem longer ago than that to me.
18. This photo is pre Second World War and so it may have been taken around the time of our Christmas visit there in the twenties. The team still play there and we’ll be looking to repeat last year’s result when we visit there later in the season.
19. The move from this ground has not worked out well for this club. This photo was taken in 1912 and many of the people in the foreground could have been thrown in one of the stadium’s later guises. City played up there one Christmas in the thirties.

20. This photo was taken in the decade we were Christmas opponents – the fifties. The club concerned still play there.


Answers
1.       Priestfield Stadium, Gillingham – modern day picture. A 1-1 draw on 27/12/32.
2.       Upton Park/Boleyn Ground – picture from an FA Cup tie against the Corinthians in 1929. Lost 3-2 on 25/12/24. (Photo by Edward G. Malindine/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
3.       Brisbane Road, Leyton Orient – 1980s. A 1-0 win on 25/12/46
4.       Elland Road, Leeds – date of picture not known. A 3-0 loss on 25/12/28.
5.       Field Mill, Mansfield – 1960s. A 4-1 beating on 25/12/37.
6.       Bramall Lane, Sheffield United – picture from 1920 to 1939. A 1-1 draw on 25/12/23.
7.       Home Park, Plymouth – 1932. A 5-1 loss on 26/12/30.
8.       Kenilworth Road, Luton – Photo from the first game at the ground in 1905. A 2-1 loss on 25/12/31.
9.       St  James’ Park, Newcastle – picture from 1958. A 5-0 defeat on 25/12/26.
10.   Griffin Park, Brentford – 1960s. A 1-1 draw on 25/12/48.
11.   The Hawthorns West Brom – picture from the 70s. A 3-0 defeat on 27/12/22.
12.   St James Park, Exeter – picture of a game Exeter played in Rio in 1904. A 1-1 draw on 24/12/38.
13.   Meadow Lane, Notts County – 1980. A 2-1 win on 23/12/50.
14.   Highbury Arsenal – picture taken in 1913. A 0-0 draw on 26/12/21 – we played in the last ever FA Cup tie at the ground when Arsenal beat us 2-1 in 2006 with Cameron Jerome getting the last goal in that competition there.
15.   Plainmoor, Torquay United – modern day. A 1-0 loss on Christmas Day 1936.
16.   Turf Moor, Burnley – picture from the 20s. A 2-1 defeat on 24/12/27
17.   Southend Greyhound Stadium – unknown. City were beaten 2-1 on 26/12/34 during the short period when Southend United played at the local dog track.
18.   Ashton Gate, Bristol City – pre Second World War. A 2-0 defeat on 25/12/29.
19.   Highfield Road, Coventry – 1912. A 4-1 beating on 25/12/33.
20.   Stamford Bridge, Chelsea – 1950s. A 2-0 loss on 26/12/53.
 
 
 
 
 
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