Before getting into the crux of this piece, a few words about the issue which has been hitting the headlines at the club in the early days of 2019.
With the transfer window now open there has been plenty of conjecture about the players we may or may not be signing this month. Frankly, when I look at the extensive list of speculative suggestions who are, in some cases, on the brink of signing for us apparently, I’m struck by the completely contradictory signals they send out – are we going to be spending getting on for £20 million for an Argentinian striker and around £6 million on a teenage centre half from Galatasaray or are we bringing in a Celtic reject, now playing for Hibs, for less than £1 million or a twenty year old striker from Sunderland who may be coming here on a Bosman free transfer in the summer?
However, with the current scattergun approach to possible transfers seen on the plethora of sites which specialise in this sort of thing, attention has settled on the story concerning allegations being made against Craig Bellamy, the man in charge of the City’s successful Under 18 team, of bullying and anti English bias.
The story had been featured on a daily basis since Wednesday I think it was in the Daily Mail. It started off with claims from the parents of Alfie Madden, an English youngster who arrived at the club two and a half years ago after being released from West Ham, that Bellamy made their son’s life a misery at Cardiff with the result that they effectively withdrew him from the club with just under a half of his two year deal left – there are also claims today that there is another player besides Madden who has made a complaint against Bellamy and is still at the club.
I could say plenty about this from both sides of the argument, but I would prefer to leave it until the club’s investigation into the story has been completed – as for Bellamy, he has denied all of the allegations and has, at his own behest, stood down from his post until the club enquiry has been concluded.
I mention the Bellamy story here mainly because it is connected, albeit loosely, to the subject of this article. As one of the people responsible for developing young players good enough to, eventually, play first team football for City, Bellamy has to be under pressure due to the fact that what was a stream of them has now slowed to what can’t even be called a trickle – to be fair to our former player, he is a relatively new employee at our Academy and, as such, can hardly be assigned “blame” for the lack of quality youngster coming through during the period of, say, 2010/2017.
On Tuesday City were brushed aside by a Tottenham outfit which, despite the glowing reputation they and their manager enjoy, have not won anything tangible since lifting the League Cup in 2008. The final score was 3-0, but, having got three goals clear, Spurs effectively declared before half an hour had been played – the gap in quality between the two teams was embarrassing as City’s inept defending played a part in each goal conceded.
The Cardiff side that subsided meekly against Spurs, following earlier home thrashings by both Manchester clubs, did not have a single Welshman in its starting eleven and there wasn’t one among the seven on the bench either. If you were looking for the closest thing to a “local boy” in the Cardiff eighteen that were shown to be not remotely in Spurs’ league, then I suppose you’d go for Bristol born Bobby Decordova-Reid who I somehow think was hardly in with the away fans in any Severnside derby he may have attended at Ashton Gate as a kid!
So, when the Spurs fans began singing “He’s one of our own”, as they have been doing about Harry Kane for the last five years or more, after our shambolic defending presented him with a goal in the third minute, our fans had no one who we could come back with using the same tune in reply. No surprise there really, because, apart from the odd brief rendition relating to Merthyr born Declan John when he played a few matches during Paul Trollope’s ill-starred reign as team boss, it’s a song that has never been heard coming from the the home support at Cardiff City Stadium.
How different it all was back in March 1961. On the eleventh of that month, a crowd of 45,000 plus made its way to Ninian Park for a Saturday evening kick off (Wales had played what was a Five Nations match in those days at Cardiff Arms Park a few hours earlier) to see their side take on a Spurs team on their way to capturing the First Division title. Not only that, they would also win the FA Cup a few weeks later, thus becoming the first side to win the League and Cup double in the twentieth century.
Now, any football comparison between the game of nearly sixty years ago and the one now is going to face charges that you are not comparing like for like. Therefore, let’s concede straight away that general playing standards in their domestic game’s top division were probably not as high in 1961 as they are now. Players are fitter these days, better prepared in terms of things like diet and their mental approach towards the game – probably most tellingly, the Premier League is a far more international competition than the old First Division was back then. The First Division was, primarily, a competition for the best the British Isles had to offer, whereas the Premier League has many of the best players on the planet performing in it every week.
So, it’s entirely possible that, despite their lack of silverware, the Spurs team of 2019 would be able to overcome their one of 1961 if they were ever able to play each other. However, when measured by what was available in 1961 and what preceded them, the team that won the first domestic double in sixty four years and in 1963 became the first British side to win a European club trophy, has, surely, to be one of the best this country had seen at that time.
The Cardiff team that faced Spurs that night had, like City’s current side, been promoted from the domestic game’s second tier the season before and had spent the first half of the 60/61 campaign too close to the relegation places for comfort. However, an improvement, which began after a 6-1 defeat at Blackpool on Bonfire night and saw them lose only three league matches in sixteen left them safely ensconced in ninth place when Spurs came visiting.
Therefore, the team which were to win the league by eight points back in those days when it was just two points for a win, must have known it wouldn’t be straightforward for them in Cardiff, but, nevertheless, their 3-2 defeat must have been seen as a pretty big shock at the time.
There are plenty of possible candidates for the award of Cardiff City’s best ever one off win in their history. 1-0 over Arsenal in 1927 would, obviously, be one, as I suppose would be 1-0 over Real Madrid in 1971 or, maybe, 2-1 in Lisbon against Sporting in 1964. 2-1 over Leeds in 2002 is a candidate given the relative status of the two sides going into the game, but, if you are talking about league fixtures only, I think I’d come up with a couple of 3-2s (Man City, the eventual Premier League Champions in 2013 and Spurs in 1961) and I can remember my parents telling me about a 2-0 win over Champions Wolves at Molineux in 1955 some three months after being beaten 9-1 by the same opposition at Ninian Park.
Forced to choose between those three though, I’d go for beating Spurs because of all of the trophies they side won (they also retained the FA Cup in 1962).
So, what was the City side which proved to be good for the “Glory, glory Tottenham Hotspur” side of the early 60’s – the contrast in make up between that team and the Welshman free zone that was our eighteen on Tuesday is very telling. Here is the eleven that managed to do what the current team couldn’t on Tuesday;-
Goalkeeper Ron Nicholls was born in Sharpness and was signed from Bristol Rovers.
Cardiff born Alan Harrington spent his whole senior career at the club after signing from local team Cardiff Nomads as an eighteen year old.
Ron Stitfall was another Cardiffian who came through the club’s junior ranks and played over 400 times in a sixteen year first team career which began in 1947.
Barry Hole originated from Swansea, but signed for us and made his first team debut as a teenager in 59/60.
Scotsman Danny Malloy was born in Denny Loan and was signed from Dundee in 1955.
Colin Baker’s route into football was identical to Harrington’s – another local boy who became a one club man over thirteen seasons after arriving from Cardiff Nomads.
Brian Walsh from Aldershot arrived from Arsenal in 1955.
Hengoed born Graham Moore came up through City’s junior ranks, signing a professional contract in 1958 as a seventeen year old. A few months later he scored on his first team debut.
Derek Tapscott was born in Barry and scored stacks of goals for his home town club. City were one of the clubs interested in signing him, but he moved to Arsenal as a twenty one year old and joined us five years later.
Peter Donnolly was from Hull and joined us from Scunthorpe in 1960.
Stockton born Derek Hogg also arrived in 1960 from West Brom.
More than half of the side were Welshmen then and, apart from Barry Hole, five of them were born within a fifteen mile radius of Cardiff with three of them being from the city itself.
City reached a season high sixth after their magnificent win. Maybe it was the effort put in on that night which was responsible, but they were not to win another match that season – in fact, their last nine games produced just three draws as they declined to a fifteenth placed finish some five points above relegated Newcastle.
The win over Spurs cannot be discounted as a one off freak result though, because third placed Wolves were also beaten 3-2 at Ninian Park, fourth placed Burnley were another to leave Cardiff defeated (by 2-1 and we beat them by the same score at Turf Moor), while sixth placed Leicester came a cropper here as well by losing 2-1 and, in another comaprison which shows the team from fifty eight years ago in a better light than the current side, seventh finishing Manchester United were thumped by 3-0..
So, a Cardiff team with a majority of Welshmen in it were able to consistently take on the best in the old First Division on their own ground that season and beat them. Certainly, the contrast between those results and the feeble efforts put in by the current team against the big six at Cardiff City Stadium are marked and cannot just be explained away by the probable lower standard competition in the early sixties. If Cardiff could field a team like that fifty seven years ago, why can’t we find even one Welshmen considered good enough to merit a starting place for us now?
I can’t answer that question in any way that satisfies me, but I do note that 1960/61 was anything but a one off.
A few years earlier, City had a spell in the old First Division around the mid fifties and which lasted for five seasons and invariably they had a majority of Welshmen in the team then. For example, the side which played its first game back in Division One after an absence of nearly twenty five years had six Welsh born players in it, while there were the same number of “natives” in the team which won that game with Wolves I mentioned earlier.
In fact, Cardiff teams throughout the club’s ninety nine year Football League existence have drawn heavily upon the talent in this area and while my knowledge of the club’s history is not sufficient to state this categorically, I’m pretty confident that that every Cardiff City manager in our Football League tenure up to and including Dave Jones would have had no compunction in giving a local youngster a first team debut in a league fixture with something on it if the situation warranted it.
Of the managers since Jones, Malky Mackay gave a first team debut to Declan John in our first game in the top flight in over half a century and in his each of his first two seasons with us regularly included an English born Academy team graduate in the seventeen year old Joe Ralls and nineteen year old Ben Nugent. Mackay’s successor Ole Gunnar Solskjaer marked our final game in the Premier League in 2014 by bringing on another Academy graduate Cardiff born Tom James for a league debut (albeit in a “meaningless” match), while Paul Trollope was appointed with the intention of introducing a “Cardiff way” which involved promotion of young Welsh talent, but didn’t stay long enough to show whether he would have implemented it or not – what is known though is that the “Cardiff way” died a death with Trollope’s departure!
I always feel a bit guilty that the only times I tend to mention Russel Slade these days is to say what an appalling City manager he was when it comes to youth development , but as this piece is about that very subject, that guilty feeling is not that strong this time! Slade wasn’t a complete failure as a City manager, far from it, but his record demonstrably proves that he was just awful when it came to developing and/or promoting young talent, be it Welsh born or not.
Current boss Neil Warnock has to be a realistic contender as best City manager ever, but I find his record when it comes to youth development disappointing. He’s not in the Slade class because players such as Swansea born Mark Harris and Merthyr’s Cameron Coxe have made first team debuts under his tenure, with Harris even playing some league football for us, but, tellingly, never in games that couldn’t have the term “meaningless end of season affair” applied to it.
So, something has changed in what is a pretty short time when you consider the total period of our Football League existence. It seems to me that somewhere along the line during this decade, picking youngsters for our first team has come to eb regarded as a risk not worth taking,
Is it a coincidence that this period equates to the time Vincent Tan arrived on the scene? I suspect it is, except that it may be that the demand for success has become greater, but, even then, three different managers were able to pick youngsters for the first team and it was only when Slade arrived that they disappeared altogether.
Of course, it needs to be said that the higher up the league structure you go, the better you have to be if you’re a youngster trying to break into the first team and it’s definitely true to say that there have been a few players at Cardiff in this decade who would have played first team football for the club if they had been around in, say, the eighties or nineties. However, local youngsters were always able to find their way into the first team in our previous stays in the top flight in the twenties, fifties and sixties and, anyway, for most of this decade when we have been a Welshman free zone, we have been a second tier side – again a level where we were never so reluctant to look to youth as we are now.
Also, I would argue that as the number of South Wales born youngsters in the Cardiff side has dried up, so their influence in the Welsh senior side has grown. Ryan Giggs, Craig Bellamy, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey are among the best players ever produced by this country in many people’s eyes and they were all born in, or very close to, Cardiff. Furthermore, this era, possibly the most successful in Wales’ history, includes players such as Joe Ledley, Chris Gunter and James Collins who all started off at City and are, as with the four others just mentioned, from Cardiff and its surrounding area.
Therefore, far from a bleak period, this is something of a boom time for football talent produced in this area and yet, after, playing an active part in the early days of what has been something of a renaissance for the Welsh national team, Cardiff City representation has been conspicuous by it’s absence in recent years. Is this because the kids at Cardiff just aren’t good enough or are they being held back for some reason in a manner they have never been before?
I’ll finish on something of an optimistic note by saying that Coxe, James Waite and Lloyd Humprhies, who are all members of the Under 23 side that came through the club’s Academy have travelled to Gillingham as part of a nineteen man squad for tomorrow’s FA Cup tie. Given City’s ongoing problems in the right back position, I’d say Coxe should start the game, but it’s more likely to be Lee Peltier I suppose and I wonder if we will see any of the young trio playing a part?
I hope I’m wrong, but my guess is that we won’t. Even if we do, the day when there will be a Welsh presence in the Cardiff City line up for “bread and butter” league games still seems an awful long way away – I find that not only sad, but also short sighted and, in the end, counter productive.
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