Weekly review 15 June 2019.

Posted on June 15, 2019 by The other Bob Wilson

The main Cardiff City related story this week has probably been the one referred to in this link. For a day or so, it was almost taken as read that City’s Chairman, Mehmet Dalman, would be leaving the club, but then this article in the local press appeared to quash any thoughts of this happening.

The categorical denial in the second story from City Chief Executive Ken Choo that Mr Dalman will be leaving would, seemingly, put an end to whole affair, but I’m going to indulge in some of the sort of speculation that our Chairman does not want to see here – not so much as to if he is leaving, more the story of the Charlton link itself.

Although the Wales Online story tries to convey a feeling that all is well and there is a united crew at the helm of the good ship Cardiff City, there are one or two elements to the whole thing that are worthy of comment.

First of all, the Evening Standard story revealing Mr Dalman as the “mystery buyer” of Charlton has an air of authenticity to it that is not always apparent in similar stories relating to possible club buy outs and the Wales Online piece accepts that there have been talks between the City Chairman and Charlton owner Roland Duchatelet (in fact they say there have been “advanced talks”).

Therefore, it’s hard to see how Mr Dalman can claim that the talk of the Charlton link is “speculation” – to be fair to our Chairman, that word is used by the journalist involved, Paul Abbandonato, on his behalf rather than the man himself.

For me, the part of what Mr Dalman actually did say (it appears in quotation marks) which took my eye the most was this;-


“Provided Vincent, Ken, Neil and myself are united, which we are, then I’m there with Cardiff. I’m not going to get distracted by this talk or anything else. ”

In particular, the first word of that quote is interesting. While the inference of the sentence is clear in that the people at the top of Cardiff City are all currently singing from the same hymn sheet, that word “provided” does open the possibility that this wasn’t the case at one time and, given that the Evening Standard first published a Charlton mystery buyer story in March, maybe it hadn’t been for some time?

Last month there was an informative piece published by Wales Online from Mr Abbandonato about the workings of Cardiff City’s four man transfer committee in which it was said Mr Dalman had been outvoted by 3-1 in the Emiliano Sala transfer. Neil Warnock advocated going for Sala, while our Chairman favoured Wesley Moraes of Brugge (who, as it turns out, signed for Aston Villa only this week for £22 million), but Ken Choo and owner Vincent Tan backed the manager.

Now, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to believe that this would have been the catalyst behind Mr Dalman’s interest in Charlton, but it does, in a way, reemphasise that the Sala tragedy cast a very long shadow over Cardiff City Football Club and all four men on that transfer committee must surely have indulged in a great deal of heart searching and self evaluation since January.

In that respect, this quote from Mr Dalman might be relevant;-

“I’ve been through ups and downs with Cardiff, handled some dreadful incidents for the club, and almost for the first time we are talking about the football again.”

I can certainly empathise with our Chairman about that talking about football bit – I’m sure we don’t know the half, or even the quarter, of what he and others at City have gone through in the months since that plane travelling from Nantes on a Monday night crashed.

As I said earlier, I’ve indulged in a fair amount of speculation there and I accept a lot of it could be rubbish, but I do believe that the Dalman to Charlton story is one that may well pop up again in the future and, if it did and our our Chairman left, how big a loss would that be for Cardiff City?

On the one hand, it would be easy to remember that by Mr Dalman’s own admission, the City hierarchy were ill prepared for our promotion in 17/18 and the fact that Ole Gunnar Solksjaer was very much perceived as a Dalman choice when he was appointed by Cardiff in January 2014 and answer “not much at all”.

However, I feel that would be unfair. Granted, I’m only talking about things like having a feeling and my opinion here, but when that Cardiff transfer committee piece talks about how all four members have their own contacts and opinions when it comes to providing players to be considered by them, I would suggest that, as the one with the most experience of working in the game, Mehmet Dalman is the one among the three non footballing members of the committee who could be relied on most to come up with suggestions which would be well suited to the club.

Also, our Chairman cannot have failed to have learned valuable lessons from his involvement with Manchester United, while, from a distance at least, he appears to be something of a calming influence on Vincent Tan. Although I’m one of many who have often pointed to the lack of “football men” involved in the major decision making processes at Cardiff City, I still believe that non football man Mehmet Dalman would be very much missed if he did move on to another club.

After a period where most of the transfer gossip surrounding the club concerned players we might be losing, the emphasis turned to possible new signings in the week just ended – Mehmet Dalman’s comment about
two or three coming in soon in the Wales Online piece on his Charlton link confirmed something that had been simmering away on social media for a few days.

As to the identity of these players, well there are two names that are cropping up pretty frequently – Will Vaulks and Joe Day. I’ve mentioned Vaulks before and concluded that his was the most likely of the names linked with us in the days after the season finished to end up at Cardiff City Stadium purely because he appears to tick many of the boxes Neil Warnock tends to consider when looking at midfield players. Indeed, while I think it’s safe to say that, with a subject where the identity of the party involved usually comes as a shock when a signing is announced, the surprise will be if Vaulks ends up somewhere else when he leaves Rotherham.

Joe Day was often described as the best goalkeeper in League Two last season and, with Newport County having already signed a new keeper from Millwall, it’s been an open secret that he would be leaving them this summer. That his destination may well be Cardiff is a little surprising given the keepers we already have at the club, however, if one of Neil Etheridge or Alex Smithies was to leave, then Day would look like a sensible signing.

Newport goalkeeper Day was not a name I’d seen linked with us until about three days ago when I suddenly started hearing from a few different sources that he would be signing for City and people who usually know about these things are refusing to deny Day is coming here when asked now.

Finally, news of a couple more pre season matches. Firstly, there was confirmation yesterday of the usual season opener against Taffs Well. For the third year in a row, there will be a match against the side from just outside Cardiff on a Friday in early July – this time time it’s on the fifth (three weeks yesterday) with a seven o clock kick off. Also, Ligue 1 side OGS Nice will be the opponents in our final warm up match on 27 July – Patrick Vierra’s side finished seventh in the French top flight last season and will, in all probability, be the only team we will be facing at Cardiff City Stadium before the big kick off.

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Wales footballing greats under pressure as Euro 2020 qualifying hopes dwindle.

Posted on June 12, 2019 by The other Bob Wilson

One really tough game and another awkward one, both away from home in sultry conditions, to end a long hard season always looked a dubious piece of fixture planning by whoever was in charge of negotiations arranging the itinerary for Wales’ qualifying group for Euro 2020 and tonight they duly followed up the 2-1 loss in Crotia on Saturday by coming off second best to Hungary in Budapest thanks to a goal by the home team inside the last ten minutes.

As second seeds in their group, you would have thought the Welsh contingent would have been in a strong position to arrange a more sympathetic pair of fixtures to end the 18/19 season with. However, with just three points so far compared to Hungary’s nine and Croatia and Slovakia’s six, Wales are now faced with a mountain to climb and, frankly, there has not been much shown under Ryan Giggs’ management so far to offer encouragement that they can recover to secure a top two finish.

The knives are out for Giggs tonight on social media and another man who would have to be mentioned as a contender in any debate about Wales’ greatest ever player is, for the first time in his sparkling career for his country, finding himself facing the wrath of disgruntled Welsh supporters.

Starting with Giggs, I think anyone reading my pieces on the games we’ve played under his management will see me trying to put over the genuine excitement I have felt as a fan when his team has played well and showed what we could potentially be seeing almost as a matter of course in a few years time. However, I think it’s thirteen matches now we’ve played under Giggs’ management and those occasions have been too few and far between to make me overly confident that the wealth of young talent we have coming through will coalesce to become a side that will be capable of putting good opponents to the sword by consistently coming up with the sort of attacking ability shown in flashes against the Republic of Ireland and Slovakia.

There is a frailty to this side that wasn’t there for most of Chris Coleman’s time in charge. This showed when James Lawrence (who has not had a good pair of games following an encouraging start to his international career) was held off too easily in the build up to the goal and Welsh players were losing too many balls in their own half that they should have been favourites for in the first half in particular.

Maybe I’m not being fair to Ryan Giggs here because he was a diligent and effective defensive player to go with all of his attacking talents, so I do feel he is aware of how important the “ugly” side of the game is, but I find it hard to avoid a feeling that there is an element of thinking which says “we’ll leave Joe Allen to get on with all that and then the rest of our midfield/attackers can start playing” in his selection and tactical decision making.

Wales have a surfeit of young, quick and talented footballers in attacking positions at the moment and, with the man who is Wales highest ever scorer and was once the world’s most expensive player to put at the heart of it, it’s tempting to look at all of those exciting options and think what can possibly go wrong – but, with just two goals and a couple of defeats in three games, something, plainly, is going wrong.

For what it’s worth, my explanation as to why we are nowhere near the sum of our attacking parts yet is that, for all the individual talent we have, they are currently just that – talented individuals who lack the quality number ten type player to knit it all together. I’d like to think that David Brooks, (or maybe Ben Woodburn or Harry Wilson), could become that player in time, but, for now, their abilities shine through intermittently and, anyway, I believe that the effects of Brooks’ injury problems over the latter weeks of the domestic season were evident in Croatia and Hungary.

The likes of Dan James, Tom Lawrence, Rabbi Matondo and, to an extent, Harry Wilson are instinctive players who will need to receive the right service as opposed to being service providers themselves and, as yet, I don’t see much evidence of Ryan Giggs coming up with a solution to the conundrum of how we get our four forward talents to think and act more in unison.

To be fair to Giggs, he has not been able to call on the player we have most suited to knitting together all of that rich attacking potential in this qualifying campaign yet.

While it’s been too long since we’ve seen Aaron Ramsey at his best in a Wales shirt, his form over the second half of the season with Arsenal when fit suggested that he could have made a huge difference if he been able to play over the past four days. It’s also worth noting that while Ramsey is not the best of defenders, as a central midfielder he has the experience of having put in defensive shifts throughout his career whereas, up to now, the impression I get is that Joe Allen and whoever is playing alongside him are being left to do too much of the work required when we don’t have the ball.

Ideally, Gareth Bale would be able to be that overseer in attacking areas, but, increasingly, it’s looking like the combination of acceleration, pace, strength and dynamism that fused with his physique and his almost unique ability to be as good on the ball at maximum speed as he was when moving “normally” has deserted him – possibly for ever. The thing with Bale in his pomp was that he was a purely instinctive footballer, as opposed to a thinking one, and, as such, the likelihood always was that once Anno Domini started to take an effect, his demise might be a quick one. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but it was always hard to see Bale adapting his game to compensate for the physical changes he was experiencing in the manner that someone like, say, Christiano Ronaldo has.

It summed up where Bale’s career is at the moment that his best work tonight was done early on in the game as a central defender dealing very capably with a series of testing dead ball deliveries by Hungary’s best player, Balázs Dzsudzsák. In the parts of the pitch where he should be most effective, Bale, again, was a peripheral figure and whereas the sort of miss that he came up with around the hour mark would have been met with astonished gasps by Welsh supporters once, now it didn’t come as a complete shock to see him make such a mess of things after being set up by Tom Lawrence.

I still say that Bale is not a candidate for the knacker’s yard quite yet. Playing amateur psychologist, I must say that he strikes me as a personality who would not cope well with the sort of dressing room ostracisation and fan criticism that he, seemingly, has experienced at Real Madrid in recent months – let’s face it, he’s like most of us in that respect. To use Ronaldo as an example again, his response in such circumstances would have been “I’ll show them”, whereas Bale has always struck me as someone more likely to shrink into himself.

Hopefully, a summer move to a club where he is appreciated more by team mate and supporter alike will lead to the return of something like the Bale of old. The days when world class defenders found him simply unplayable (“taxi for Maicon” anyone?) may have gone, but he could still be instrumental in turning around his country’s spluttering Euro 2020 qualifying campaign while doing his under fire manager a huge favour in the process.

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