Daily update 4 June 2023 – Erol Bulut anyone?

Posted on June 4, 2023 by The other Bob Wilson

If I was a paranoid type, I’d be accusing the decision makers at Cardiff City tonight of having read the piece I did this morning talking as if the appointment of Vitor Campelos as our new manager was a done deal and decided that they’d embarrass me by naming someone else as the man in charge some five hours later!

In fact, I would not only be paranoid, but I’d also have a heavily inflated view of my own importance. However, although I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory this morning, I did get one thing right – I said not many, if any, City fans would have known of the existence of Vitor Campelos before Thursday and I think the same is true of our new manager. Furthermore, I don’t think they would have heard of him until this lunchtime when the BBC and Wales Online websites carried stories about the appointment followed about an hour later by a confirmation on the club website.

There’s a Tweet posted today by the journalist who operates under the name Roath Boy saying that he’d spoken to Chairman Mehmet Dalman who’d told him that the club’s number one target had been offered a job by a Bundesliga club and that he guaranteed that Roath Boy would not have heard of him.

I said that there may be a few real nerds among the City fanbase that had heard of Vitor Campelos and I reckon that applies moreso to Erol Bulut who is our new manager having turned down that Bundesliga club for us it seems.

I’m definitely not among those who will have heard about Bulut beforehand, so I’m like many others who are going to his rather brief Wikipedia page to get some information about him, but you only have to look at one of the clubs he has managed to feel that his name may be better known to some supporters of the club than Campelos’ was.

There’s not much more I can add about our new manager besides what appears on his Wikipedia page, but I can’t say I’m too enamoured with what I’ve read about him from people who claim to know how Bulut’s teams play. Apparently, at his last club, the average age of the team was nearly thirty, he favours a high pressing game, is prepared to let the opposition have most of the ball and specializes in low scoring and pretty dull games (he is reported to have said that the opposition had all of the ball, but we ended up with the points after a game). Some of that reads like Neil Warnock, but does Bulut have the man management skills that help make Warnock a success at this level in the short term at least?

Given that most of this inside track information came from Twitter, I’m sure there are many who will feel that I’m placing too much store in something they wouldn’t give the time of day too. In truth though, I’m not paying too much attention to what is being said about Bulut on social media – he deserves to be analysed tactically with an open mind when we start playing our warm up and early season games.

The truth is that, as a Cardiff fan, I’ve become very good at recognizing teams that prefer not to have the ball and feed off opposition mistakes while playing a type of game that is not easy on the eye – if Bulut sends out his side to play that way, I’ll know soon enough that all that is being offered is more of the same, mostly unsuccessful, fare that we’ve been watching for most of the past ten years and more.

. To counteract the last three paragraphs to some extent, I could make a guess that, based on his pretty extensive experience of Futsal, Erol Bulut is someone who places a lot of store on the technical side of the game, but there’s no guarantee that I’d be right in thinking that, so, as I say, it’s probably best to just wait and see.

Moving on, you would think that having managed a club as big as Fenerbache and having, apparently, turned down a job in the Bundesliga to come here, Bulut is going to be on fair whack at Cardiff.

Despite a general acceptance among supporters that we’re skint this summer, the club are presenting Bulut as being a step up in class from recent City managers – it’s being reported that “the boat was pushed out” by the club opting for Bulut (incidentally it’s been reported that the other names on City’s four man shortlist for the job were Nathan Jones and Oscar Garcia who I spoke about in this morning’s piece plus our former player and son of John, Cameron Toshack who was a well regarded Academy coach at Swansea and worked as an assistant to Jesse Marsch at Leeds).

Vincent Tan has talked about how he thinks that having a manager like Bulut at Cardiff will mean that better players will be more willing to sign for us because of the manager’s reputation.

Just what has Bulut done to earn the sort of reputation City clearly think he has though? I suppose his greatest single achievement has been taking his second club Alanyaspor to their first ever Turkish Cup Final, but, despite not lasting a full season at Fenerbache, that club were having their best season in seven years under his management and he had a decent record at Gaziantep, his last club, despite their financial problems and the effects of the serious earthquake that hit Turkey earlier this year.

I used the word “intriguing” to describe the reported Campelos appointment and I think the same applies to Erol Bulut who will be giving his first press conference on Monday. However, even if he really is an improvement on what we’ve had lately it seems to me that he’ll have to do a couple of things if we are not to go through a repeat of what we saw in the season just ended.

First, Bulut will need to get more out of the club’s younger players than we saw in 22/23 and, secondly, he will quickly need to identify the areas where we need improvement and put the theory that he can attract better players to the club to the test straight away.

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Weekly Review 3 June 2023 – Vitor Campelos anyone?

Posted on June 3, 2023 by The other Bob Wilson

After the inertia since Cardiff City preserved their Championship status five weeks ago, there has been a feeling of things starting to move in a week which ends with it being almost certain that we have got our new manager – even if I swear no City fans will have heard of him before Thursday when his name was first linked with the job!

Actually, I should qualify that – if any City supporters had truly heard of Vitor Campelos before this week, I salute them as a far better qualified aficionado of the European, particularly the Portuguese, game than I am!

When I first read of our interest in Mr Campelos in a Tweet a few days ago, I headed straight for his Wikipedia page and, frankly, as I went through it paragraph by paragraph, I found myself thinking this must be a joke, not even City would appoint a nobody like this.

For a start, Campelos had not played the game at professional level. Now, there are enough good managers around who weren’t good enough players to reach even a modest professional level for this not to be a problem for me. However, I’m also not green enough to imagine that they faced many a sceptical dressing room when they were first making their way in the game – the conversation would have been along the lines of the cliched “show us your medals”.

If Vitor Campelos comes here and is finding things a struggle, you can guarantee that this is a subject which will come up somewhere along the line, but, having been working in the game for about fifteen years now, he will have surely comes across it before.

Back to that Wikipedia page, as I ploughed on through the jobs in charge of reserve teams in Hungary’s Third Division and in Saudi Arabia and the UAE still not finding anything to suggest he was the man to take on what is, increasingly, looking to be a very tough job (the Second Tier podcast was telling all and sundry that City were in the worst position of any of the twenty four teams in the 23/24 Championship currently and I found it hard to argue with them) I was asking myself why him? There must be something here to indicate why Campelos had been interviewed twice, as reported in the Tweet I read, for the vacant manager’s job, but what is it?

Slowly, but surely, little signs that there might be something more to Campelos than first meets the eye began to emerge until the final few sentences of his Wikipedia biography showed why someone at City had hit upon his as a possible next manager of the club. For a start, although he had begun at a very low level, there was no question that his career path has been upward to the extent that around a decade after first breaking into the game, Campelos was managing in the top flight of the Portuguese game.

The fact that he was out of a job within six months suggested that Campelos may have reached his ceiling and when another job in Saudi Arabia went badly, his career was at a crossroads. However, from the moment he was appointed at Chaves, who were in the Portuguese Second Division at the time, in early 2021, Campelos’ career has been on a different plane.

It’s significant that all but one of the references used to help compile Campelos’ Wikipedia page are from 2021 or later. This backs up what the facts tell you – it was at this point people started taking notice of Mr Campelos.

In 21/22, Vitor Campelos was chosen as Portuguese Second Division Manager of the month on three occasions as his side finished fifth and were promoted via the Play Offs. More impressively, Chaves were widely credited as having over performed in 22/23 as they finished seventh in the top flight (that’s one place short of the club’s best ever finishing position).

In fact, you get the feeling Chaves could have finished higher, but the club’s owners made the decision not to make the stadium improvements required to host European football on the grounds that it was too much to pay out for something that was not guaranteed. The first six qualify for European football in Portugal and the decision not to compete in UEFA competitions was taken before the end of the season, so it’s possible that there was an element of anti climax to the closing stages of Chaves’ campaign.

While it’s possible to see why the club made the decision not to spend the money needed to host European football, it’s also clear that those on the playing side would have been disappointed by such a decision.

Therefore, there was an expectation that Campelos might well decide not to extend his contract at Chaves when it runs out at the end of this month and, sure enough, there was an announcement from the club yesterday that their manager was leaving with the suggestion that he had a new project lined up in another country. The statement also hinted that, wherever Campelos was going, his technical staff would be going with him, so, if he is to be our new manager, does that mean that we may well have seen the end of Dean Whitehead and Sol Bamba’s time with us as both of their contracts are up on the thirtieth of this month?

Trying to put all of this into a domestic context, you have to think that a manager who took over at a smallish club, got it promoted into the Premier League on a shoestring budget and then almost qualified them for Europe would be the subject of speculation linking them with bigger clubs.

Indeed, t would say that there are some similarities with Nathan Jones and Luton. Jones got his chance with a bigger club. In fact, he got it twice and the fact that he was sacked at both Stoke and, very quickly, at Southampton has created the suspicion that he can only work his magic at one club – by the same token, for all that he did at Chaves, Vitor Campelos has to prove that it was not a one off or some sort of fluke.

Jones became the bookies favourite for the City job for a while last week and I still feel we could do a lot worse than appoint him, but it’s hard not to believe that if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to with the Blaenrhondda born man.

The other name which came to the fore in the last seven days was Oscar Garcia who has a CV as a player and manager, in terms of clubs he’s been employed at, which easily beats anything Jones and Campelos can come up with.

However, Garcia, who has Championship experience after taking Brighton to the Play Offs in 13/14 and worked, very briefly, for Watford, has never stayed anywhere longer than eighteen months in his managerial/coaching career and his record over the first half of that career is much more impressive than the second half is. While Garcia’s lack of longevity in his jobs might be seen as hardly a problem when it comes to someone who hires and fires managers as regularly as Vincent Tan has lately, it was something which made me not as keen on us appointing him as some others were.

Returning to Vitor Campelos, my thanks to the messageboard posters who found these articles on him and his Chaves team

https://portugoal.net/club-news/3181-portugoal-figure-of-the-week-vitor-campelos-chaves-charges-stun-below-par-benfica

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12884305/vitor-campelos-exclusive-interview-on-taking-chaves-to-the-brink-of-europe-only-for-president-not-to-register-the-club

https://theanalyst.com/eu/2022/08/portuguese-primeira-liga-stats-2022-23/

Reading those three pieces, what cannot be denied is that Campelos did a superb job during the two and a half years he was at Chaves. The question no one can answer with any certainty at the moment is whether someone capable of performing to that level has always been there waiting to be given the chance to show their worth? It’s possible, but, there has to be an equal chance that Vitor Campelos’ time at Chaves was his “fifteen minutes of fame” and, away from them, he’ll revert to being the peripheral figure he was for the rest of his football career.

Of course, the chance, albeit a pretty faint one I’d guess, that Campelos doesn’t end up at City cannot be discounted – I may be jumping the gun here. I hope I’m not, because, whatever else it turns out to be, this strikes me as a brave and totally unexpected call by City of the sort I did not think the current hierarchy had in them.

I’ve not got a clue whether Vitor Campelos will succeed or fail as City manager, but, it seems to me that, if there’s any justice, it will be the former. If you can’t be optimistic about a new manager when they first come to your club, when can you be?

Apparently, Hull City were interested in appointing Campelos last autumn before they settled for Liam Rosenior, so you’d like to think this is not some left field punt from Tan and co picked because he wouldn’t cost us much. There are all sorts of reasons why the appointment will not work, but those two and a half years at Chaves offer at least the hope that “shrewd”, a word hardly ever used in relation to Cardiff City in the past ten years or so, could be appropriate here. However, for now, “intriguing” seems to be better suited.

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