Cardiff City returned to south Wales with a point from the Hawthorns today as they drew 0-0 with West Bromwich Albion. It was their third straight clean sheet and their fifth game without defeat and I’m pretty sure it was a match they would have lost a few weeks ago.
Of course, the longer our good run goes on, the more interim manager Omer Rica will face questions as to whether he should be given the job on a permanent basis (his record was the second best in the Championship in the month of October), but he’s said he’s not going to address this issue with the media from now on – he may not be saying it in so many words, but his message appears to be that he’ll let his record do his talking for him and you have to say that he is right to do so.
If every Cardiff City fan (and I mean every) is being honest with themselves, no one thought “give him the job on a permanent basis” on that Sunday after we’d lost to Leeds when it emerged that Erol Bulut had been sacked and Riza would be the caretaker boss.
For myself, I assumed Riza would do the job for about a fortnight, he clearly wanted to be the full time manager, but I thought he had no chance and believed that the only question was would he be kept on by whoever the new manager turned out to be?
More than that, I didn’t care if the new manager kept him or not – after all, he was supposed to be a coach whose speciality was attacking play and we had a team that had scored one goal in the six league games we’d played since he arrived.
However, its goals that I’d say are now the main reason why Riza has to be involved with City for the long term even if Vincent Tan decides to look to someone else as manager.
Despite our awful, record breaking, set of results to start the season, it was our goals for and against figures that I used to hone in on when I really wanted to emphasise just how bad we were at the time Bulut left – in six league matches, we’d scored just the once, while letting in thirteen. They are figures which absolutely scream out relegation and probably relegation confirmed weeks before the end of the season.
Things got worse before they got better as well, the goals against figure increased rapidly to seventeen after Riza’s first match in charge at Hull with the very small consolation being that we’d doubled our goals scored figure while showing for the first time some fleeting glimpses that Riza did have the ability to make us more effective attackers.
So, it was two scored and seventeen conceded after that first match, but the fact that it is now eleven scored and eighteen conceded after twelve matches is the best reason I can come up with as to why you have to start thinking that there’s not a better candidate out there than the man who’s currently in charge when it comes to availability and the realistic finances the club can afford.
I’ll admit that my huge reservations about Riza’s suitability for the manager’s job had ninety nine per cent disappeared after the Plymouth and Portsmouth wins and, if anything, it was the latter match which played the bigger part in my decision because it showed that what had happened three days earlier was not just some sort of blip – we were very good against Portsmouth for an hour and then when we came under some pressure late on, we showed the extent of our improvement in defence.
However, not everyone feels the same way. There was talk about how Riza’s Cardiff had only played against teams from the lower reaches of the Championship, a game against fourth placed West Brom would provide Riza’s first real test with a tough looking match at home to Norwich, then Luton away and home again to Blackburn to follow.
Well, one down out of the four and, after it, you’ve got to admit that Riza’s stock is higher than it’s been at any time over the past five weeks, but I suppose the remaining doubters would say that Riza had luck on his side because there’s not been a better time to face the Baggies this season than today.
Here, I will concede that the naysayers have a point – West Brom were five without a win (three draws and two losses) going into today with just a single goal scored in their last four matches.
Furthermore, playing at the Hawthorns seems to becoming a bit of an issue for their players – while they’d only conceded one league goal at home all season, they’d also only scored two and today was their third home scoreless draw of the season.
You could see Albion were a team lacking in confidence in attacking areas today because, despite a big lead in most of the relevant stats (sixty four/thirty six possession, nineteen to six in goal attempts, four to nil in on target attempts, thirty six to nine touches in the opposition penalty area and twelve/one when it came to corners), City could claim to have the majority of the better chances to break the stalemate.
West Brom captain Darnell Furlong put a header from six yards wide, Grady Diangana drew the best save of the match from Jak Alnwick and Josh Maja headed a presentable chance straight at Alnwick in the dying minutes, but City could point to an early Callum Robinson header against the crossbar from Perry Ng’s cross during a first half an hour when City went toe to toe with the Baggies in terms of attacking intent as an entertaining spectacle flowed from end to end.
However, it was in a more prosaic second period, when City spent nearly all of the time defending as the effects of two games in four days playing a high pressing style at home became a factor, that they had three other great chances.
Robinson’s first half header came from a cross which was just a tiny bit too high for him to head downwards and so I would not be too critical of that miss, but our top scorer completely missed his kick from ten yards when Ollie Tanner rolled back a very inviting cross for him. Similarly, when a blunder by defender Mason Holgate presented an open goal with the keeper well off his line , I was pleased to see the ball going to sub Chris Willock because I thought he was the player on the pitch at that time with the best technique to get the required lob right from a range of close to thirty yards, but, instead, he sent his effort well over the bar. Finally, two players who could not use the tiredness excuse, Yakou Meite and Wilfried Kanga, contrived to make a right mess of a two on one as Albion chased a winner.
Those misses taken along with the fact that we’d had the chances to at least double our score against Portsmouth suggest that, despite all of those goals against Plymouth, the standard of finishing among the squad is still too low.
However, today was more about doggedly defending our goal as old problems concerning ball retention made an unwanted return. To be fair, Albion are a physically imposing side that showed there is nothing much wrong with their pressing game as we found it harder to move the ball about as those stats I quoted earlier presented a fair representation of the match in its last hour in particular. That said, although it was like a fourth v twentieth game in many respects, it was also a chance for our defenders to show that Riza has made big improvements at either end of the pitch.
I’ll finish on today’s match with a question a reader might be able to answer. From what I understand, the object of the exercise in modern day coaching is to create “overloads” (i.e two v ones and three v twos) in any area of the pitch, why is it then that City insist on handing opponents a free overload by only sending one man out to cover a potential short corner, thus giving their opponents a two v one straight away?
It happened plenty of times today and the commentators on the West Brom stream I watched were critical of our laziness and about how we were “not switched on” at set pieces. The thing is, it seems to be a deliberate policy this season because we did it under Bulut and we continue to do it under Riza, so, clearly, the coaching staff at the club believe there are advantages to letting the opposition take their short corners, but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is.
In other football, the Welsh women’s side suffered a very disappointing 2-1 defeat in the First Leg of their Euros Play Off tie in Slovakia last night. Against opponents twenty two places below them in the world rankings, Wales could have no complaints at trailing 2-0 after an hour, in fact it could have been much worse.
For all of the talk of improvement and expansion in the women’s game, the simple truth was that, without long term injury victim Sophie Ingle and the recovering Jess Fishlock for the first time in five years, Wales looked very, very ordinary as they gave the impression that they owed their ranking position solely to the presence of at least one and maybe two world class players in their squad.
This feeling that Wales’ lack strength in depth was only added to when Fishlock, generally reckoned to be well short of one hundred per cent fitness, was introduced and, hey presto, previously insipid Wales started to produce some sort of attacking threat. Slovakia had been so comfortable, but came under real pressure in the final quarter of an hour when Wales had more chances to score than in the previous seventy five minutes. Fishlock managed to lay on a goal that was coolly finished by another sub Ffion Morgan and so it’s everything to play for in Tuesday’s second leg at Cardiff City Stadium.
City’s under 18s were 2-1 winners today at Colchester with Troy Perrett, making his way back after an injury hit start to the season, and Jake Davies scoring.
In local football, Treorchy Boys and Girls Club beat St Joseph’s 3-2 in Division One East of the Highadmit South Wales Alliance, while Ton Pentre lost 3-1 at Porthcawl in the W John Owen Cup.
