The league fixture list for Cardiff City’s Under 18 team this season is truly barmy. Having started with a preponderance of home matches, they finally returned home for the first time in more than two months yesterday when they entertained a Millwall side which went into the encounter in second place in the table.
They are scheduled to play at Leckwith on the next two Saturdays. Although, in saying that, the club website has them playing Ipswich at 11 o clock and Hull away in the Youth Cup at 7 in the evening on the 15 December. Presumably, either the league match will be cancelled or the date shown for the cup match is wrong – flying up to Hull in the afternoon straight after the first match is a possibility I suppose, but you’d have to question how seriously we were taking the Youth Cup if that happened!
Anyway, back to the league fixture list. After three scheduled home matches on successive Saturdays, the Under 18s are then on the road again until late January, so for those of us (and I doubt it if there are many) who go along to youth team games to support the team rather than to watch relatives or acquaintances of theirs play, it’s hard to have any sense of continuity to the season. This is a shame, because the first half of 18/19 has been as successful a start to a campaign as the youth side have had since gaining Academy status in 04/05.
Based on yesterday’s 1-1 draw with opponents who had not lost in six matches going into the game, all of those weeks of playing away games has had a bit of a detrimental effect on the team, because they did not play to the standards I saw earlier in the season. Although they came close to winning the match late on when they hit the post, a City win would have been very harsh on a Millwall side which generally had the better of things for long spells in the game.
The first thing to say about the match is that the excellent new pitch at Leckwith made my pre match fears that I’d travel down on the train from Treherbert only to find that the game had been postponed because of a waterlogged pitch look pretty stupid – it played perfectly.
The pitch was a help in producing a good first half which I thought City just shaded – they were definitely playing the better football, but a bigger visiting team (the physical difference between the sides became more pronounced as the game went on as the three substitutes City brought on were all on the small side) were able to impose themselves on proceedings and the longer the game went on, the harder it got for City to maintain the standards shown in the early stages.
Although there were opportunities for Millwall in the first half, the ability of City midfielders, and sometimes defenders, to thread passes through inside the full backs to put colleagues into space was a feature of the first half an hour or so. Unfortunately, they were never able to capitalise on these opportunities because of a combination of poor technique or wrong options taken when it came to playing the pass or shot which should have at least resulted in an effort on the Millwall goal. As it was, Fanshawe in the Millwall goal was only really tested by an Isaak Davies effort after being set up by a fine Ryan Reynolds ball.
The first half did not get the goal it deserved, but one was not long in coming after the break as the visitors took the lead three minutes in from a corner with the ball being diverted to the far post where, not for the first time, there was an overload of Millwall players that caught City on the hop and O’Brien was able to score easily from close range.
City’s response was not long in coming as Sam Bowen played a free kick into the “corridor of uncertainty”, but before anything could come of that situation, the referee was blowing for a penalty, presumably given for a holding offence against one of the home players attempting to exploit what looked like a very dangerous dead ball delivery.
Tellingly, there were very few Milwall protests at the award and Dan Griffiths, scorer of two penalties on his way to a hat trick in the 11-0 Welsh Youth Cup romp at Taff’s Well last weekend, opted for power down the middle from the spot as Fanshawe dived out of the way.
Nothing to do with yesterday’s game, but I’m grateful to Michael Morris of the Cardiff City Mad website for this superb photo of Aron Gunnarsson’s goal on Friday night – he called it “Guard of Honour”!
At 1-1 with the second period less than ten minutes old, the match was set up to go either way, but it has to be said that from then on, Millwall generally had the better of things. As mentioned earlier, the visitors greater power became more of a factor, but it would be unfair to put Millwall’s superiority solely down to this – they were generally brighter and quicker than their opponents in the game’s final half an hour.
This was reflected in a series of goal attempts which flew not far high or wide with home keeper George Ratcliffe looking as if he would have struggled to reach them if they had been on target. Ratcliffe did excel straight after our equaliser as he made his best save of the game, but I suppose that if I was critical of some of City’s finishing before the break, the same had to apply to Millwall after it.
City had little to offer in response as they looked like a team that was seriously missing their most influential player, Sion Spence, who is still out with an injury picked up on Wales duty in September. Spence scored thirty times last season, but also provided creativity from the number ten position and support for a striker who did not tend to get as isolated as he looked yesterday.
Griffiths was forced to fend for himself more and more as the game went on yesterday and, after he was withdrawn, the same applied to Davies who moved into the middle to replace him. These two players were named in the Wales Under 19 squad which qualified for the Elite Round of the European Championships for the first time since 2014 (Davies had to miss out through injury) recently along with Ratcliffe, Reynolds, who captained the side, and Bowen.
How Wales would have deployed Griffiths and Davies if they had started a game together would have been interesting- would they have used them as a two through the middle or like City do with Griffiths through the middle and Davies wide on the right? With us sitting top of the league, it must be said that their our can hardly be called a failure, but yesterday Davies, who I’ve seen play so well as a centre forward in the past, looked wasted out wide and Griffiths was too often left on his own.
Yet, for all that City were not at their best, they came the closest to getting that winning goal when sub Ntazana Mayembe hit the post with two minutes of normal time left.
City stay at the top of their league with twenty five points, while Millwall are one of six teams chasing them who are within half of dozen points of that, but all of these sides have played at least two games more than them, so I think it’s fair to say that they should be happy with a point from a game they may well have lost because it does them little harm when you look at the bigger picture.
