Seven decades of Cardiff City v Preston North End matches.

Posted on April 7, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

I’ve mentioned before that I’m sure Preston North End are the team we’ve played more than any other since I started supporting City in the early sixties. Since our promotion to the Championship back in 2003, we’ve played them every season apart from the two we spent in the Premier League and, despite their longevity in this division, they have generally been regarded as far more likely to be relegated than Cardiff for the large majority of the past twenty two years.

Season in, season out, Preston find themselves tipped to be down among the division’s dead men by both pundits and bookies and season in, season. out they comfortably confound their critics. Preston hardly, if ever, do that by mounting a serious promotion challenge, they do it by making a habit of finishing in the 10th to 16th range every season. Yes, I daresay life is pretty boring for Preston fans and there may be those who yearn for a relegation struggling season just to spice things up a bit, but Preston are now reaching the close of yet another season where they’ve been underestimated and generally unregarded, but what would a Stoke, Cardiff or Hull give now for this having been a season of quiet competence for them instead of another campaign ruined by owner incompetence?

Of course, Preston go on recruiting shrewdly on a modest budget by the standards of this division with Peter Ridsdale having held a position of importance at the club for what seems to be about fifteen years now. Now, I’m not going to make Ridsdale out to be something that he isn’t (not for nothing is he known as “the Riddler”!), but, despite the HMRC originated court appearances, I look back now and think that, when you consider that Sam Hammam took over the club with the twenty first century no more than a few months old, Ridsdale is the most competent person we’ve had making the big decisions at the club in this Millennium!

As I say, Ridsdale has his faults, but I think back to the teams he used to help put together in the late noughties and there were some great signings made through him of the sort of players we could really have done with this season, for example, Glenn Loovens, Roger Johnson, Steve McPhail and Michael Chopra.

City head up to Preston tomorrow with their best hope of getting the win they really need probably coming from the fact that, having lost their FA Cup Quarter Final with Aston Villa, the Deepdale club’s season is quietly coming to an end with a series of matches which mean little or nothing to them. Put this with the fact that we’ve won on four of our last five visits to Preston, and, with a different City team, this would be a game I’d be fairly confident about.

However, this is a team which finds it so hard to win matches, as evidenced by twenty points it is now which have been frittered away from winning positions.

Sadly, if I were a neutral trying to predict the three sides to be relegated from the Championship. I’d have to select Cardiff as one of them because, apart from beating a Blackburn side every one is beating these days, we’re doing nothing to suggest we can avoid the drop.

Oxford beat the league leaders on Saturday, Hull get an away result with a winner deep in added time, Derby win four on the trot, Stoke put an out of form QPR team to the sword while we play out a bore draw with them, Luton are unbeaten in four – the list goes on and all Cardiff offer is three games unbeaten with the last two only adding to a feeling that this is their time to go down.

City only had eight substitutes on Saturday offering evidence that, with it having looked for a while as if our long injury list was clearing up for the run in, it’s back, like it has been for most of the campaign, disrupting things in a squad which is not good enough anyway.

Whether we scrape clear of the drop or not, some sort of review into why so many of our players have spent long portions of the season out with injuries has to be held, but it will be just one of a series of such reviews because the lesson of this and the last few seasons has been that there is an awful lot that is wrong at Cardiff City.

On to the quiz, here’s seven Preston related questions with the answers to be posted on here on Wednesday.

60s. Given the outcome of the game, it would be wrong to suggest that this Scottish defender’s best moment in a Preston shirt came against Cardiff City, but he did score the only goal of his career that day. He started off with a team that were not so dominant at the time as they are these days, but he did play for them in a Cup Final against their greatest rivals which was won by a huge margin. Very much a squad member at his first club, he found himself in the same sort of position at Preston – he played five years for both of his clubs and yet didn’t make it to a hundred league appearances in his career, can you name him?

70s. Having started his senior career by becoming the youngest ever player to represent his first club (a record which still stands to this day), this midfielder had a longish and much travelled career which never really lived up to the promise that his debut appearance, made at left back, suggested. His first club were not the power in the land that they have been for most of their history when he set his record, but he played a part in helping them towards the level they regard as their default before he moved to Preston some six years after he had set that youngest player record. He was a pretty regular starter for Preston in his three years with them before making what was a very unusual move at the time to play in mainland Europe for a team nicknamed the Drawing Pins! His return to England was brief and unsuccessful as he played just five times for south coast blues that had fallen on hard times, before he played for a capital city club in his native country and his career closed among non league Faithful not too far from where he’d set that record some thirteen years earlier – can you name him?

80s. Safe to chortle at this striker? (3,8)

90s. Defunct currency auction?

00s. Midfielder sounds like eccentric front man for seed drill inventor!

10s. Survivor of ordeal by cats sounds angelic!

20s. Presurise TV pundit perhaps?

Answers.

60s.John Donnelly scored from right back for Preston in their 6-2 defeat by Cardiff at Deepdale in September 1962, but the stand out moment for him in a chequered career has to be when he was a member of the Celtic team which beat Rangers 7-1 in the 1957 Scottish League Cup Final.

70s.  Jimmy Brown was fifteen years and three hundred and forty nine days old when he made his league debut for Aston Villa in 1969. Brown signed for Preston in 1975 and then moved on to Greek side Ethnikos (nicknamed the Drawing Pins) three years later. In 1980 he returned to England to play a few games for Portsmouth, before moving to his native Scotland to play for Hibs. Brown’s career finished with a season in non league football representing Worcester City (nicknamed the Faithful).

80s. Lee Ashcroft.

90s. Mark Sale.

00s. The seed drill was invented by Jethro Tull in 1701. Jethro Tull are a long standing rock band from Blackpool fronted by Ian Anderson – Iain Anderson is a  former footballer who played in Preston’s midfield between 2000 and 2003.

10s. Daniel (of the Lion’s Den fame) Devine.

20s. Will Keane.

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Draws keep mounting up for unconvincing Cardiff.

Posted on April 6, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

Cardiff City kept their first away clean sheet in close to six months at Queens Park Rangers today and, given that they had only failed to score in one league match in 2025, you would have hoped that this would have signalled one of the two or three wins they will probably need to secure their Championship future.

Instead, we got only our second goalless draw of the season and with Plymouth, Hull and Oxford all winning while Luton and Stoke picked up decent draws, it has to be true to say that if you thought we were going down before today’s game, you surely feel a bit more certain about our fate after today – put it this way, I can’t see how anyone has become more convinced that we’re staying up after watching today’s match.

Last week i said that our draw with Sheffield Wednesday was a pretty good game of football made frustrating by our failure to react to Wednesday’s half time substitutions quickly or effectively enough and our poor defending for their equaliser. This time around, you could make no positive claims about the quality of the game, it was poor fare throughout and, for a team that now appears to have a range of decent options up front, our finishing was pretty awful.

The positive aspect of the afternoon was that rare clean sheet and, although Ethan Horvarth had one of his periodic nervy games and was unconvincing in dealing with set pieces, the outfield players helped ensure that he was never seriously troubled by them as we dealt well with free kicks and corners by and large.

The fact that City’s better players were defenders like Andy Rinomhota, who came through the ordeal of playing so soon after the tragic death of his brother last weekend with flying colours, and Will Fish showed what kind of game it was. It’s so typical of a struggling side that they cannot perform well at both ends of the pitch in the same match as the front four who did well last weekend all struggled to get close to their standard of seven days ago – two of them didn’t make it past half time.

Omer Riza’s team selection got people excited pre game as last week’s front four of Alves, Ashford, Davies and Salech were joined by Rubin Colwill playing in the deeper midfield role he filled in the FA Cup tie at Villa Park.

Truth was though, that Colwill almost certainly wouldn’t have started were it not for a pre match injury to Calum Chambers which meant that we were only able to field eight substitutes. That said, I would have thought one of David Turnbull or Alex Robertson would have been a more likely replacement for Chambers, so it was a show of faith in Colwill by the manager to see him start.

Indeed, with Fish and Joel Bagan paired at centreback, it was probably the youngest starting eleven fielded by City in a league game this season. Unfortunately for those of us who advocate more trust being shown in younger players, three changes made at half time tells you that the original selection did not work.

QPR, as you would expect from a team with eight losses in their last eleven games, were no great shakes themselves, but they were winning most of the fifty/fifties and while it would be harsh to say City were playing as if they were on the beach already, you wouldn’t have thought they were the side in the bottom three who were supposed to be fighting for their lives.

Rangers looked the sharper and if they were hardly peppering our goal with shots, they would have definitely gone in at the break thinking they should have been ahead. Winger Paul Smyth, who gave Callum O’Dowda an awkward afternoon, came closest to scoring when he burst past weak tackles from Mannsverk and Colwill to fire a shot from twenty yards that Horvarth made a bit of a meal of as the ball seemed to swerve just before it reached him.

Rangers also claimed a penalty when Alfie Lloyd went down under a challenge by Mannsverk which I thought fell into the “I’ve seen them given “ category, but there was an offside flag up at the time, so it may have been that this accounted for a penalty not being given. Lloyd also shot across goal with no one able to get a touch, while all City had to offer in return was a shot from twenty yards by Colwill that flew narrowly wide.

Riza clearly wasn’t happy with what his team had produced and Davies, Alvez and Bagan, who didn’t seem fully fit to me, made way for Callum Robinson, Ollie Tanner and Jesper Daland.

Three half time changes for Cardiff City wasn’t as effective as Wednesday’s last week, but they did improve us a little and I would say we shaded the second period. Nevertheless, it was probably Smyth who came closest to breaking the deadlock again as Horvarth made the best save of the game to turn his fifteen yard effort aside for a corner. Apart from Horvarth’s worries from corners though, there wasn’t much else from the home side to suggest they could break the deadlock.

In truth, there wasn’t much from City either, but you couldn’t help thinking there should have been. Too often though, players chose to shoot from unlikely angles and positions when they had team mates better placed. Salech was guilty of this, but he also hit a shot just over from a promising position and also might have won a penalty when he went down as he appeared to be grabbed by Ronnie Edwards, but referee Dean Whitestone was a bit of a homer all afternoon and it was no surprise to see him wave play on. 

However, City’s best chances were from a couple of late headers, the first of which fell to Robinson from a good cross by Fish and the second to Yakou Meite, on for Ashford, from an O’Dowda corner, but on both occasions they could only head over. 

So, yet another draw then and I can’t help feeling that our failure to turn some of them into wins is going to cost us (only Plymouth have won less games than us now). 0-0 was a fair outcome today, but some pretty ordinary City sides of the recent past would have found a way to win it 1-0 – frustratingly, two single goal wins in forty attempts tells me that this team finds such victories almost impossible.

Jack Sykes is a name I wasn’t familiar with among City’s army of youth players, but I will be from now on after his trick secured a 3-3 draw for our under 18s at Leckwith this morning against Wigan.

In local football, Treherbert Boys and Girls Club drew 1-1 at home to table topping Cardiff Draconians in the Ardal Leagues South West, but there was no follow up to Ton Pentre’s first win of the season in the their last match as they crashed 8-0 at Port Talbot Town to remain bottom of the Highadmit South Wales Alliance Premier League.

Posted in Football in the Rhondda valleys., Out on the pitch, The kids. | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments