I sat down to watch Cardiff City’s game at Newcastle today with a sense of foreboding. Part of the reason for this was that City were missing two important players, Harry Arter and captain Sean Morrison.
As is always the case under this manager, it is easier to get blood out a stone before a match than information about possible absentees and the reasons why they wouldn’t be playing. As I type this, I’m still none the wiser as to why Arter did not play – presumably, he was injured, but there are stories emerging now that Bournemouth may want to curtail his loan deal early.
As for Morrison, early in the week there was a brief statement from the club saying that he was in hospital for a “procedure”. Well, it turns out that our skipper’s appendix had burst and his life would have been under threat if the required operation on it had been delayed much longer.
Morrison will be out for at least six weeks it seems and, while he has not been in the best of form lately and Arter did a passable impersonation of a headless chicken in last week’s draw with rock bottom Huddersfield, these are two big players for the club and without them, our line up looked a very weak one by Premier League standards as Bruno Manga moved into the middle from right back and Lee Peltier came in as an indirect replacement for Morrison – a central midfield combination of Joe Ralls and Victor Camarasa with Callum Paterson operating as a kind of number ten looked weak as well..
The other reason for that sense of foreboding which I mentioned at the start was a purely selfish thing – any sort of streaming using my sometimes problematic Broadband had been very much hit and miss in the hours leading up to the game and I was not confident that I would get to see too much of what was being described as our most important match of the season so far against the team that was a point and a place below us in the table.
In the event, the streaming service was patchy for the first twenty minutes and then packed up completely, so, this is going to be one of those occasional shorter pieces I’m forced to do because it seems daft to go into great detail about a game which I saw so little of – especially when so many of you reading this saw all of it.
From what I did watch, I was not altogether surprised by the eventual decisive 3-0 defeat we suffered. While there was no great threat to our goal apart from a Rondon header that Neil Etheridge did well to turn over the bar while I was watching, the way we were continually gifting back possession to our opponents suggested that even a Newcastle side with the worst home record in the four divisions would make us pay eventually and, shortly after the stream of the match had packed up for good, that’s exactly what happened.
With a couple more goals added after the break, a team that you’d class as representing one of the best bets to go down instead of us were comfortably better than City, just like another such team in Huddersfield was in our previous game.
While I accept that I shouldn’t really be drawing too many conclusions from a game I saw so little of, everything I’ve read and heard about it so far cries out that it was another one of those games where we look like the worst team in the Premier League by an absolute mile.
The table may tell you something different and there might be someone that has not gained a point so far compared to our one, but, in 2019 at least, we have been the worst team in the Premier League. After all, New Year’s Day saw us lay on a comfortable training game for Spurs, we then clung on for a home point against a bottom of the table side that had lost their last nine games and today a team that has given the impression that they were scared of their own shadow when playing in front of their home crowd were way too good for us.
The stats say that we had one on target effort today to go with the none against Huddersfield and the three against Spurs, but the truth is that I cannot remember us coming remotely close to scoring in the first two of those matches and I heard nothing to suggest that we did today either – throw in the traditional couldn’t care less third round FA cup loss as well and it’s now something like three hundred and seventy minutes since Victor Camarasa’s superb match winner at Leicester which tonight feels much longer ago than just three weeks.
As a side that played for much of the first half of the season without a natural striker, our need for one was blindingly obvious and there was indeed one involved today in Oumar Niasse who signed on a loan deal until the end of the season from Everton yesterday. Niasse was thrown in today without even training with his new team mates it seems and so can hardly have been expected to transform our play, but it’s mildly encouraging that he comes here with the good wishes of many Everton fans who say he made a good impression with them as an impact sub.
Niasse’s arrival does not mean that the move for Nantes’ Emilliano Sala is off though. While the Argentinian’s club record signing is dragging on interminably (the club have finally confirmed his arrival tonight), he has taken his medical, terms have been agreed and he has, reportedly, snubbed a late and more lucrative offer to go and play in China in favour of coming here.
So, hopefully, we will have two strikers with decent scoring records in the English and French first tiers respectively for the rest of the season, but, even if the Sala we were signing had an h on the end of his surname, he would find it next to impossible to hit the net with the sort of service his new team mates have been providing in the past month.
Neil Warnock said that the fee for Sala is going to be around £15 million rather than the oft reported figure of at least £3 million more than that, Even if we go with that lower figure though, Sala’s arrival would take the transfer spending by City to the £50 million mark for the past twelve months, but, realistically, if we are going to give ourselves a decent chance of survival, the figure will have to rise a fair bit more to bring in the right back and central midfielder we are crying out for.
Although the perception is that Vincent Tan is operating much more carefully this time around, Sala’s arrival would see transfer spending getting towards the sort of levels seen in 2013/14 – in fact, if we do get the defender and midfielder I mentioned then it may well exceed it.
Our manager said he wasn’t too displeased with his side today considering that nine of the starting line up were with City in the Championship last season, but, yet again, there was no place in the starting eleven for the four players brought in during the summer for a combined fee of about £28 million, while £6 million striker Gary Madine made his debut on loan to Sheffield United at Swansea tonight – all of this stands as an indictment against a manager who has done so well here in many other ways.
However, I found it a bit depressing to hear Neil Warnock almost talking down our new strikers as players with limitations because that was the nature of the market we have to deal in. While you can look at the spending levels of other clubs in this league and see Mr Warnock’s point, you would like to think that £50 million would still be enough to buy yourself a bit of class and the quality I believe is so sadly lacking in this squad, composure – but, instead, it’s almost as if the latter is discouraged at Warnock’s Cardiff!
So far, all of this transfer spending has seen just the one technical footballer come in (and he’s only on loan at present), while there have been plenty of workhorses, athletes and/or power players. No one should be surprised by this sort of transfer dealing because it’s the way our manager has gone about things since he first became involved in that side of the game back in the eighties, but it’s a method that has never worked in the Premier League for him and, as of tonight, it’s looking very much like it won’t do again.
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