How on earth didn’t City win?

Posted on January 9, 2018 by The other Bob Wilson

I suspect the reality may be different, but, off the top of my head, it seems that every time Cardiff City meet Millwall at Under 23 Development team level, the game ends in a draw!

It was no different at Leckwith yesterday lunchtime as it finished 1-1 and you can’t help thinking that if one of the sides still cannot win when they are as much on top as City were for the last third of the match, then it’s hard to see how there will ever be a positive result when they meet!

The Cardiff side featured senior players in Lee Camp, Liam Feeney, Omar Bogle and Anthony Pilkington, while there was also the usual assortment of trialists. I say that, but it might well be that there weren’t quite as many as normal trying to earn a contract, because, judging by the team line up shown on Twitter prior to kick off, it’s possible that a couple of them  have already signed deals with us.

Wealdstone defender Ciaron Brown and free agent forward Ogo Obi (both of whom played a couple of games for us at this level on trial in the first half of the season) were both mentioned by name in the team line up, whereas the former Leeds pair Paul and Jack McKay and Farnborough midfield player Jacob Evans (who played a couple of games for Swindon last season) were down as “trialist” – not conclusive proof that Brown (whose profile is still on the Wealdstone FC website) and Obi are now City players, but I think they may well be.

Brwon took his place alongside Paul McKay at the heart of City’s defence in a side captained by James Waite who was used alongside Connor Young in a deeper midfield role than he normally plays, while Obi was on the bench along with Jack McKay and Evans as the match got off to a slow start.

Indeed, there was not much to take the eye of watching manager Neil Warnock and goalkeeping coach  Andy Dibble in the first forty five minutes as, despite City enjoying what I would call a slight superiority, the two teams tended to cancel each other out.

Camp saved well from a header by visiting centre half Christian Mbulu and Rhys Abbruzzese eventually needed treatment on a bitterly cold day after taking the full force of a well struck Kris Twardek drive which looked to be on target before the left back’s intervention, but, mostly, the play tended to be heading towards the Millwall goal as City generally had trouble with their final pass as they failed to turn promising situations into an actual goal threat.

There were a couple of occasions during an unfortunate minute or two for Mark Harris when the home side looked like opening their account. The young forward was unlucky when a powerful header from a corner by McKay that would have, at the very least, forced Millwall keeper Harry Girling into urgent action hit him and bounced away for a goal kick, but he should have done much better when Girling came charging outside of his area and his header dropped at Harris’ feet in a central position some twenty yards from goal – there was a defender back trying to cover the situation, but, essentially, Harris had an open goal to aim at, but could only roll his shot wide.

The opening fifteen minutes of the second half saw the match continuing on a path which suggested that it would end goalless – Millwall applied some pressure without suggesting they had a goal in them, but generally the pattern of City having a slight edge continued.

When the deadlock was surprisingly broken on the hour mark, it was down to a neat piece of play by Pilkington as he received a Feeney cross, eluded his marker and poked his shot home from about six yards – it looked easy, but it also had a touch of quality to it as I don’t think there were many other players on the pitch who would have scored under the same circumstances.

What happened next brought to mind a situation which occurred in a League Cup tie between Yeovil and Plymouth a decade or more ago whereby Yeovil scored after not putting the ball out for an injured Plymouth player to receive treatment and their manager Gary Johnson told his side to allow Argyle to equalise straight from the restart. There were no injured Millwall players around, but the way City immediately conceded a corner after scoring which Camp dropped at the feet of Twardek who gratefully turned the ball slowly in suggested, for some reason, City felt obliged to present their opponents with an equaliser.

With the exception of one moment late on when unmarked towering visiting centre forward Harry Smith volleyed over when well placed some eight yards out, the rest of the match saw City lay siege to the Millwall goal. In many ways, it reminded me of Newport County’s terrific win over Leeds in the FA Cup twenty four hours earlier when  they put their opponents under so much pressure that their last minute winner seemed inevitable – the one key difference was though that the inevitability was that City were destined never to get a second goal.

With Feeney and Cameron Coxe consistently getting the better of their opponents down City’s right, chances came at regular intervals, but the goal which would, surely, have secured the win, stubbornly refused to materialise.

Credit should go to Millwall for some desperate defending that somehow kept City out in a series of goalmouth scrambles (one of which seemed to go on for about thirty seconds!) and Girling came to their rescue on four or five occasions, but it was telling that although all of these saves were in the decent to good category, none of them were outstanding and so you had to feel that at least one of the home players involved should have been able to put away at least one of what were a series of great chances.

Luck was against City as well when they hit the woodwork twice, but, even then, there was that profligacy again on the first of these occasions as Bogle blazed over from close range after a header had smacked against the crossbar. However, Waite deserved so much better after a run from the halfway line which had seen him show pace and surprising power to stay clear of the chasing defenders than to see his left foot shot from the corner of the penalty area rebound off a post.

Obi, Jack McKay and Evans were all introduced, with the latter adding to the catalogue of near misses with a couple of efforts from around twenty five yards that flew narrowly side of either post, but shortly after Waite’s shot from a free kick some twenty yards out flew straight at Girling, City had to accept a draw in a game in which I though all of our back four did well in, with Brown in particular creating a favourable impression.

Finally, Newport’s reward for their Cup heroics in last night’s Fourth Round draw was a home tie with Spurs, while City have the incentive of what is an even more attractive game as they will entertain Manchester City if they beat Mansfield in their replay. We’ll need to play an awful lot better than we did on Saturday though if we are to face the side that is turning the Premier League into a procession this season (as I mentioned in my piece on the Mansfield match, I reckon we have to be underdogs going into the replay).

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Pity the poor children.

Posted on January 7, 2018 by The other Bob Wilson

At the turnstiles before yesterday’s FA Cup Third Round tie with Mansfield, two young lads (I’m useless at guessing kids ages, but I’d say they were seven or eight) were telling a steward it was their first ever City game. The steward responded that they would remember Cardiff v Mansfield in January 2018 for the rest of their lives as the day they embarked on a lifetime supporting their club and I mentioned it was Northampton Town in October 1963 for me – this appeared to impress the steward far more than it did the two first time supporters!

On the face of it, whoever decided to take those two lads along to yesterday’s game seemed to have had a good idea – it was a lot cheaper to get in than normal, the crowd was always going to be smaller than normal and as we were stood third in a division that was two levels higher than the one our opponents were in, you would have thought that there was every chance that they would see a Cardiff win as well.

That’s precisely what I thought when the draw was made about four weeks ago back in the days when we were unbeaten at home in the league (we had lost to Burton in another “meaningless” cup game mind), but to anyone who had watched us in all or some of our four matches over the holiday period, they would not have been too surprised with how the match panned out.

I suppose the good news is that our four game losing run is over, but when you end up grateful to have drawn 0-0 at home to a League Two side, you really know how far things have slipped.

That said, backed by a raucous support of over a thousand fans, who comfortably outsang the home crowd on a bitterly cold afternoon, Mansfield were well worth their draw as they took their fine current run to just one defeat in their last nineteen matches in all competitions.

The fact that Mansfield only lie seventh in League Two despite them having barely lost a game in the past three months offers the clue that probably too many of those nineteen games have ended all square (their ten draws is the highest figure in the division) for manager Steve Evans’ liking, but they looked a confident team yesterday and they were not in the least intimidated by their meeting with their so called betters.

Of course, given City’s recent results and, more tellingly, performances, there was no real reason for Mansfield to have felt intimidated and they returned to Nottinghamshire with their management proclaiming themselves “gutted” to have only drawn – they had a point as well on an afternoon when, in the second half in particular, it seemed to me that they had the better chances to break the deadlock.

As seems to happen so many times in professional games at all levels in this country these days, the first half proved to be a non event with “not conceding” taking priority over attacking ambition – I can remember a header not too far over from the visitors, but that was about it as far as any attacking threat from them went. As for us, Rhys Healey (wasted out on the left wing as far as I was concerned) made such a mess of a decent early chance that his shot from just inside the penalty area flew out for a thrown in, but in the closing stages of the half, there was at least some work for visiting keeper Conrad Logan to do as we upped the attacking pace to the extent that it could be said that we had been the better team in a pretty miserable first period.

So there were grounds for thinking at half time that City could go on to win the game and this despite what seems to be our permanent air of crisis when it comes to injuries reaching new and, frankly, ridiculous, lengths this week.

Yesterday’s team was missing defenders Lee Peltier and Matt Connolly who have both been ruled out for a month with the former needing an operation and Neil Warnock confirmed in his post match press conference that Joe Ralls had “pulled out” on the morning of the game, Sol Bamba missed out with a sickness bug, Junior Hoilett (who came on as a sub in the seventy seventh minute) had been showing flu like symptoms, but I’d also say that he has been suffering from the consequences of all those high intensity games played for Canada in the summer, while Joe Bennett wasn’t going to be playing, but had to and ended up being on the pitch for the whole ninety minutes.

Our manager claimed Hoilett had been tired in the lead up to the game and said that his team had lacked “a little bit up front”. For me, this goes to the heart of the problems we have had in the last fortnight or so – we now finally have the front three which terrorised opposing defences early in the season available, but none of them are performing to anything like the standard they showed then.

For me, the biggest change Neil Warnock brought about last season was that he introduced pace into our attacking play as Hoilett, Kenneth Zohore and Kadeem Harris (who was playing, and scoring for the Development team before Christmas, but the absence of any sort of game time for him since then has me fearing that he has suffered another setback in an injury plagued campaign). The addition of Nathaniel Mendez-Laing only increased our attacking pace to the extent that, for a month to six weeks anyway, I think we had the most potent attack in the division.

Harris has still to see any first team action and so has not been a factor at all, but the other three speedsters are there and yet yesterday really brought home to me how much we are lacking when it comes to attacking pace currently.

Mendez-Laing has been back for a month now after missing a similar period with the injury he sustained early in the Severnside derby game in November, but he’s not the same player of August and September as he struggles to get past his marker continuously. As for Zohore, well, it was like watching one of his very poor early games for the club yesterday as he completely failed to impose himself physically on his markers.

It is generally accepted now that, even at his best, Zohore isn’t as good in the air as someone of his height should be and there was the usual lack of success when contesting high balls yesterday, but, far more concerning for me was the lack of pace and power shown by him.

I’ve read and heard comments that Zohore looked disinterested yesterday and it’s easy to see why people would reach that conclusion, but I wonder if it may have been that we were seeing a player who was feeling sorry for himself somewhat? Zohore was continuously flexing and stretching his legs which suggested to me that he had some sort of issue in his groin area, but, given that he stayed on until the eightieth minute when he was replaced by Anthony Pilkington, it obviously wasn’t a major inconvenience.

Neil Warnock made no reference to this when asked about Zohore after the game, but did say that his striker was still searching for that burst of acceleration which was instrumental in making him such a key performer for us in the first ten months of 2010 and, not for the first time, I thought that, understandably in a squad which is so injury racked I suppose, players are being rushed back from their bumps and bruises when they’re not quite ready for a return to first team action.

In the case of Mendez-Laing in particular, I think we are seeing him going through a crisis of confidence as he needs something good to happen for him to get him back to thinking like he was back in the autumn. The same applies to Zohore and Hoilett, to some extent, but I’d say there are also physical issues with these two as well in that they are playing more football than their body can cope with at the moment.

Amidst all of the injury gloom, the better news is that Sean Morrison played seventy five minutes in his return after the injury he picked up at Reading and did well, while Jazz Richards played his first game in three and a half months and came through without any sign of a problem. However, once again, we have this situation, caused by having so many first team squad members unavailable, that sees players returning from injury thrown in at the deep end when they should really be getting a more gentle reintroduction through a Development team match or two.

Zohore and Mendez-Laing continued to labour in a second half which, again, saw the best opportunities fall to Healey, notably when he fired over from a sharp chance from about twelve yards out and then when he didn’t put enough power into his shot after being put through by Callum Paterson (part of what Neil Warnock called a “mix and match” central midfield duo with Greg Halford) as a defender got back to clear a shot, which had beaten Logan, off the line.

However, Mansfield could point to chances that probably should have been taken with a bit more sharpness in front of goal as they showed a more ambitious approach after the break. By and large, City defended well and either Brian Murphy or one of the back four would be able to snuff out the danger, but it was Hoilett who made his best contribution during the short time he was on the pitch with a great bit of tracking back and covering which prevented the visitors breaking the deadlock from their best opportunity.

City roused themselves for a “grandstand” finish when they put Mansfield under the closest thing that passed for concerted pressure during the whole afternoon, but it was typical of their lack of attacking punch all game that, when Logan was called on to make the save of the match in added time, it came from a header from one of his own players, Kristian Pearce.

So, City face a replay which, as the media always say, is the last thing the bigger team in any Cup tie want. Speaking as an old fogey who can remember the days when sixty games a season plus was a common occurrence, I don’t generally have much sympathy for the modern day professional who often doesn’t manage a half century of appearances during a campaign, but it’s a bit different this time when we have so many players unavailable, not match fit, ill or generally knackered.

Maybe a win against Sunderland next Saturday will make things look different, but after Neil Warnock took the option of picking what was a strong team yesterday given all of our injuries and we still couldn’t our poor run, Mansfield have to be considered favourites for the replay.

Whatever happens at Field Mill though, I wonder whether, having had to sit through ninety minutes of poor quality fare almost devoid of the sort of action needed to capture the attention of youngsters on a bitterly cold afternoon, those two boys I mentioned at the start will ever come back to watch their second City game – they certainly deserved more from their first one.

 

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