Weekly review 23 June 2019.

Posted on June 23, 2019 by The other Bob Wilson

For those of us not close to the situation, progress on the Emiliano Sala tragedy had reached something of an impasse with the full report into the accident by the AAIB (Air Accident Investigation Branch) not being expected for a few more months yet following the publication of an Interim report in February.

However, on Wednesday, Detective Inspector Simon Huxter of Dorset Police’s Major Crime Investigation Team announced that

“As part of this investigation we have to consider whether there is any evidence of any suspected criminality and as a result of our inquiries we have today, Wednesday 19 June 2019, arrested a 64-year-old man from the North Yorkshire area on suspicion of manslaughter by an unlawful act.

He is assisting with our inquiries and has been released from custody under investigation.”

There was widespread coverage of this announcement in the national press with the identity of the man arrested not being given initially, but later editions of the Daily Mail and the Times were among those that named him as David Henderson.

Although Mr Henderson had been reported as being a few years younger than sixty four in reports that appeared in the days and weeks following the crash and, as far as I’m aware, there has been no official confirmation that he was the man arrested, there now appears to be general acceptance that the Mail and the Times had got his identity right.

For anyone who does not know who Henderson is, he was the qualified pilot agent Willie McKay allegedly contacted to fly Sala (who had, seemingly, completed his move to Cardiff a couple of days earlier) to Nantes and back after the player had rejected his new club’s offer to pay for a commercial flight for him to and from France.

Somewhere along the line, it would appear that something happened to prevent Henderson from going ahead with the flight and, so, presumably, the charge arises from the fact that he arranged for David Ibbotson, who did not have the necessary qualifications as a pilot to undertake such a flight, to take over from him?

Whether any of this will effect where Cardiff City stand in this awful matter seems doubtful to this non expert. However, if and when, conclusions are ever drawn about the crash, whether it be in the courts or through a formal inquiry, City might be in line for criticism regarding their approach as to how a 15 million pound asset of their’s went about the flight he wanted to make back to his old stomping ground for one last time to say goodbye to friends and former team mates.

If that were to happen, then City would probably be unlucky in that, as a club that was something of a Premier League apprentice, they were the ones to fall foul of a system that, as far as I know, was the norm for most teams in the top flight. While it’s conceivable that the very top clubs might have fully qualified pilots and even planes that they owned on call to deal with such eventualities, I’ve seen nothing yet which states that City acted in a manner which was different to most other Premier League teams.

Therefore, it seems to me that the likelihood is that the outcome would have been the same if it had been another Premier League team that had signed Emiliano Sala and, if this is the case, then you have to question the priorities of such clubs when it comes to spending the absolute fortunes they earn in television money even for a single season in “the best league in the world”.

Moving on, the earlier mention of the Daily Mail leads me on to that paper’s pursual of City’s one time Under 18’s coach Craig Bellamy relating to allegations that he bullied young players under his charge.

Obviously, such allegations had to be investigated and so when Bellamy voluntarily stood down from his post while an internal investigation into his behaviour was carried out by the club, there seemed no reason to crisicise City’s approach.

Well, after some earlier speculation on the matter, it was officially confirmed this week that Bellamy had accepted an offer to link up with his old team mate at Manchester City, Vincent Kompany, who has just been appointed Belgian club Anderlecht’s manager.

Bellamy will be in charge of Anderlecht’s under 21 team and the truth is that he could well have accepted such a tempting offer anyway even if he were still in position as one of our youth coaches when it came along.

However, given that the City had refuted another Daily Mail story from last month which claimed Bellamy had left Cardiff after the completion of the internal inquiry against him, I do find myself thinking that they really dragged their feet over this one.

I say this especially when you consider that we are a club that is, supposedly, going to be losing our manager at the end of the coming season and that we are also a club about which it had often been touted that Bellamy would eventually be appointed as Cardiff manager himself.

Maybe there was never any substance in those rumours about him being our next manager and, anyway, I’m sure Bellamy would be sorely tempted to cross the channel again and come back home from Belgium if the Cardiff job was offered to him next May, but it does seem unsatisfactory that he has left us now with these allegations still hanging over his head. Presumably Vincent Kompany doesn’t believe there is any substance to them, but I wonder if we’ll ever find out officially about the veracity of the allegations now?

I always like it when the fixtures for a new season are announced because it means that a return to training and the first pre season matches are not too far away and so, the new campaign seems that much closer now after City’s programme for 19/20 was announced on Thursday.

A complete list of our fixtures can be found here and, from a personal perspective, I’d say that, especially in the Championship at a time when no one knows what squads will look like in six weeks time, there seems little point in pronouncing, as many have done already, about how easy our start to the season and how difficult the end to it is. All I’ll say for now is that I’m glad to see some proper local derbies in there and us with a home game on Boxing Day!

With a career record of fifteen goals in over three hundred appearances, Curtis Nelson would hardly be seen as a potential regular scorer for City if he did come here, but Oxford fans seem to rate him as a better player than their former centre back Chey Dunkley who played thirty eight times in the Championship for Wigan last season.

Finally, the only really worthwhile story to emerge on the transfer front in the last week was this one which scores high on the authenticity scale for me. While it seems to be typically modern day Cardiff City thinking to describe a twenty six year old as “young” in the way some supporters have done and there isn’t a great deal in Curtis Nelson’s career so far to suggest he can challenge for a centreback spot in what we all hope is going to be a high end Championship team, there does seem to be something of an Etheridge and Mendez-Laing feel to this possible transfer and we all know how they worked out!

Also, I take heart from threads like this one and this one from an Oxford United messageboard I visited and, of course, there is also the fact that I often used to sign Nelson as a teenager from Plymouth when I was in charge of Cardiff City on Football Manager circa 2010 to 2012!

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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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