The 0-0 draw against Huddersfield at Cardiff City Stadium in January was definitely the worst we played this season without losing – in fact I would probably rate our performance that afternoon as one of our worst of the 18/19 campaign.
Therefore, I daresay Neil Warnock must have been grateful for the opportunity presented to him in his post game press conference to go off topic and opine on the subject that most of this country has become heartily sick of – Brexit.
If you are one of what must be a very small number of City fans who are not familiar with what he said, I’ll not repeat it on here, but I will give a one word, neutral I hope, verdict on it – “trenchant”!
Now, because I want anyone reading this piece to stay with it right to its end rather than click on that x in the top right hand corner of their screen muttering “bloody Brexit” (or words to that effect!), I should say straight away that I have not taken leave of my senses by imagining that discussing the decision taken in that Referendum nearly three years would increase the readership on my Cardff City blog!
No, Brexit should be considered as a backdrop to what I write about the news that Neil Warnock will be staying at Cardiff for one more season as he tries to make it a ninth promotion in a managerial career which started back in 1980.
When considering how I would structure this piece, I, for some reason, cottoned on to Brexit as what I believe is an effective way of getting across how I believe the club will be affected .
Before that however, I’ll just quickly state my own opinion which, while certainly not being a neutral one, is one that can acknowledge that there were powerful arguments on either side of the divide.
I would have thanked Neil Warnock very much for the great job he had done at Cardiff, but told him that the time was right for a change at the top. I say that knowing that we would be losing a very good motivator, someone who knows the Championship like the back of his hand and someone who would, on the face of it, have most, if not all of, the current first team squad onside when it comes to wanting to play for him and the club.
Especially in the league we are going to be in next season, those are assets which can take you a long way and while it is tempting to imagine how someone new coming in could improve us in areas where we may be considered weak now, it’s easy to take the good things Warnock brings to the club for granted and assume they would not be lost when he moved on.
So, that’s how I feel, but I’m trying to look at things here more from the club’s point of view and in terms of what can be done during the next season when Mr Warnock is still here to prepare for his departure.
This is where I think the Brexit analogy comes in because, Cardiff City have an awkward set of problems to come which have to be faced up to – they have a manager who is at an age where there are all sorts of reasons why things like five or ten year plans under his watch would be a waste of time -something has to be done to address this at a date in the not too distant future.
After our win at Old Trafford last weekend, Neil Warnock insisted that there was “not a cat in hells chance” of him staying on beyond next season. Therefore, the assumption has to be that, just as with Brexit, there is a date, probably some time next May, which can be seen as the equivalent to the 31 October deadline the UK is facing now with regard to leaving the EU.
Although it would be funny to see our manager’s reaction to this given what he said following that Huddersfield match, the decision Cardiff City and Neil Warnock had to make during the past week was whether to “remain” in their relationship which began in October 2016 or “leave” each other. Of course, this could entail either an interim period which ensured as smooth a transition as possible could be arranged or a “crashing out” (why do Remainers always refer to a no deal Brexit as crashing out, rather than just leaving?) that had Mr Warnock being relieved of his duties at the end of this season!
There is another alternative which needs to be considered. A year from now, with another promotion achieved, Neil Warnock could, his “not a cat in hells chance” comment notwithstanding, find himself fancying one last attempt at redefining a career description which read “very effective Football League manager who could not cut it in the Premier League”.
In that event, the Cardiff Board and owner would have a difficult decision to make. Insisting that a manager who had taken their team up to the top flight twice in the space of three seasons should leave would go down like a lead balloon among a body of fans which, generally speaking, would be even more supportive of Mr Warnock than they are now and the temptation would, surely, be to “kick the can down the road” for another season and see how things look in May 2021.
That remark, used so often in the past year to describe Theresa May’s Government’s attitude to the looming Brexit deadlines they were facing, captures exactly what the hierarchy at Cardiff City have, in effect, done in the last few days though doesn’t it?
It certainly does for me, or I’ll qualify that to say, it certainly does for me unless they start preparing the ground now for what will happen when Neil Warnock is not here.
There was a time about three or four years ago when local media and supporters were almost unanimous in their opinion that “a football man” was needed at Cardiff to act as go between in Board/owner and manager consultations – someone with the requisite financial and administrative abilities who also “knows the game”.
In the event, what we got instead was a manager who had a strong enough personality to, and got the results which, enable him to win his fair share of battles with the money men – Neil Warnock may not have ticked all of the boxes when it came to the longed for “football man”, but he was a pretty good substitute for one in many of the different facets as to what makes a modern day football club tick.
However, I only say many of the different facets, not all – there have been aspects on the football side which have not improved during Mr Warnock’s time at the club.
To give a couple of examples, Cardiff’s record, in terms of producing first team footballers at least, remains just as poor now as it was in the Russell Slade days – the club spend a seven figure sum every year on the Academy and it is clearly failing in its primary function.
Similarly, although Neil Warnock has had his successes in the transfer market, his record in that department is mixed with a worrying tendency for the chances of a good recruit arriving to decline in direct proportion to how big his transfer fee was.
Neil Warnock has his own way of playing the game and it has been effective at Cardiff to a large degree. Therefore, I’m surprised (albeit pleasantly) to see so many supporters expressing a wish for a change to a more “footballing” approach.
Again, there has to be an element of “be careful what you wish for” here mind, because we don’t have a squad built to play that way and, anyway, even with the time and investment put in to get us to the required method of play, a complete change of approach where we aim to become Man City Mark 2 would, surely, be destined for failure on the grounds that too many sides would be better at it than us.
It would be like going from one extreme to another, better by far for me would be a method which retains elements of our current approach which we could turn to when we were being out Man City’d so to speak.
These are the sort of things that the current hierarchy have shown little or no interest in tackling during their time at the club. Going back to style of play, I don’t for a minute think that Neil Warnock is perfectly happy with our possession percentage or, more particularly, our ball retention. I refuse to believe that he isn’t bothered by how awful we can be at keeping the ball .
In recent years, I’ve been won over by the argument which says that possession isn’t everything – although our percentage possession figures were appalling last season, the fact that we were able to finish in second place in such a competitive league tells you that much.
However, a basic ability to give and receive passes should be a prerequisite of anyone playing the game in the top two divisions of the domestic pyramid and, too often, Neil Warnock’s Cardiff team contains too many in it who are uncomfortable with or substandard at these basics.
I think it would be entirely reasonable for, say, a Board member to ask the manager why this is so, I’d also say they should be asking serious questions about the Academy and looking to implement a recruitment policy more in line with a Premier League/top ten Championship standard of operation.
Now is the time to be looking for that football man who could help with these things while Neil Warnock works on trying to get us promoted. There would bound to be clashes between any newcomer and someone as opinionated as our manager, but the club would have to find a way around them for the greater good.
Given the arrangement that seems to have been arrived at in the last few days whereby the Warnock era at Cardiff is coming to an end, you would think that any casting vote from the money men would probably go against him. It would be sad to see this result in an early departure for someone who has done so much for City, but, like Theresa May, the kicking the can down the road has to end some time for Vincent Tan and his minions.
