Weekly review 5/6/16 – Russell Slade departs.

Posted on June 5, 2016 by The other Bob Wilson

Coymay

It was getting to the stage where I was going to struggle to put together a couple of paragraphs about the events of the last week when the news broke quite late on Friday afternoon that Russell Slade had left Cardiff City.

I had definitely been of the opinion that Mr Slade’s time at the club was going to come to an end sooner rather than later, but was expecting his tenure as Head of Football to be a bit longer than three and a bit weeks that it turned out to be.

I mentioned last week that Mr Slade had been linked with the vacant jobs at Blackburn and Charlton, well the appointment of Owen Coyle put paid to the first of those options, but the second one is still very much a possibility. In fact, it’s more than that – Sky are reporting that Mr Slade is in discussions with the London club as they face up to life in the division he probably knows best of all and the bookies have him at 8-1 on favourite for the job.

Therefore, although it’s fun to speculate on what brings about someone’s departure from a position they had only occupied for not far short of a month, the pretty banal truth in this instance would appear to be that the person concerned has had a job offer for a position which he feels more at home in than the one that had been created for him.

So, having moved halfway out of the door, so to speak, at the beginning of last month, the job has now been completed for the man who has been in charge for the vast majority of the past two seasons. No doubt, those City fans who had pushed for Mr Slade’s removal will be happy with this news, but I suspect that even among those who were prepared to fight his corner, there is relief that what looked like an unsatisfactory state of affairs has been resolved by a clean break being made.

Having been around long enough to have seen City finish a season as the third worst team in the Football League, I had problems with the attitude shown by some on Mr Slade’s appointment that, basically, said that a club like Cardiff was too big to be employing someone like him as manager. Such opinions were criticised in the local press as being arrogant and I tended to agree – however, as the man makes his departure from South Wales some twenty months after he was made manager, I can’t help thinking that those who were against Russell Slade because he was too “smalltime” for Cardiff City have been proved right.

In saying that, it doesn’t mean that I rate Russell Slade among the worst managers I’ve seen at the club. Indeed, in terms of league position at least, I think a decent argument can be made for saying he over achieved in 15/16 at first team level given the playing and financial resources at his disposal.

It should also be said that, in the eyes of many supporters, perhaps a majority of them, a manager is perceived as having done a good job if the first team are able to carry a promotion bid on until the penultimate game of a season.

Furthermore, anyone who saw the system we were playing as we into added time against Bolton (it was almost a return to the 2-3-5 of my youth!) would have to concede that our former manager was not averse to risking defeat in pursuit of going for a win sometimes.

However, that game has to be looked at in context. We were up against a team which finished at the bottom of the league a very long way short of safety that day, we were facing a team which only picked up four away points all season and we were facing a team which had to play for an hour with ten men – anything less than a win that day and I dread to think what the reaction towards the manager would have been.

Russell Slade applauds the supporters after the final match of the season against Birmingham. That match was like so many under his management - honest effort from all of the players, but a failure to totally convince. Now, he leaves the club with me thinking that most of those supporters are glad to see him go - I count myself in that number, but hope that someone who came across as a fundamentally decent man is able to finally enjoy some tangible success in his management career.*

Russell Slade applauds City supporters after the final match of the season against Birmingham. That game was like so many under his management – honest effort from all of the players, but a failure to totally convince. Now, he leaves the club with me thinking that most of those supporters are glad to see him go – I count myself in that number, but hope that someone who came across as a fundamentally decent man is able to finally enjoy some tangible success in his management career.*

We made our usual low key start to a home game against Bolton, which pointed to the caution that I thought was always at the heart of Mr Slade’s approach at Cardiff. Cautious and uninspiring tactics (at home and away), cautious and uninspiring substitutions, and, although he was hamstrung to a degree by the size of the budget he was given, largely cautious and uninspiring work in the transfer market (three of the sides which finished in the top six featured signings made from the league Mr Slade was supposed to know all about  – a league which he virtually ignored when it came to bringing in new players to Cardiff) all pointed to someone who, for me, never really believed he, or his team, could compete on equal terms with some of the Championship’s big names.

Just to confirm, I was talking about League One when I spoke of the league Mr Slade was supposed to know all about. During the 13/14 season when they so nearly got promoted, Russell Slade’s Leyton Orient played with a freedom and style which his Cardiff sides very rarely matched and I can remember being impressed by his Yeovil team at times – I don’t think the awful punt it upfield stuff we saw from City around the middle of the 14/15 campaign represented Mr Slade’s preferred method of playing, but I don’t believe he ever truly felt confident that he could really “go for it” in the Championship at Cardiff.

So, I suppose what I’m saying is that Russell Slade probably was too smalltime for a club whose owner believes they should be finishing in the top six in the Championship as a matter of course – it looks like he is returning to a league he feels more at home in and maybe he can now get that promotion which has eluded him up to now.

What Russell Slade leaving will do is silence the talk about nothing having changed at the club despite the shake up announced a couple of days before our final match of 15/16 – Paul Trollope is assuredly in charge now and, hopefully, we will soon learn the identity of the back room staff he wants to bring in to help him.

The only other items to mention are the announcement of a couple more pre season matches – we travel to Forest Green on 13 July and there’s another game for the first team in Germany when we play Bochum (who finished fifth in Bundesliga Two last season) at Herne on 26 July, so, for the first time in my memory, it looks like we won’t be playing any warm up matches at home.

There was also the, almost compulsory, transfer speculation when it was claimed we were chasing experienced former Celtic centreback Terry Wilson who has been released by Forest and then was promptly denied by “club sources” within hours.

*picture courtesy of http://www.walesonline.co.uk/

Posted in Down in the dugout, Out on the pitch | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Muhammad Ali 17/1/1942 – 3/6/2016.

Posted on June 5, 2016 by The other Bob Wilson

Coymay

It must have been around the time when Victoria Wood and Prince died on successive days about six weeks ago that I heard someone from the BBC’s Library section being asked if 2016 was an exceptional year when it came to celebrity deaths.

The expert acknowledged that this year had already seen the BBC publishing as many obituaries of the famous as they had done throughput 2015, but said that he did not see anything to justify some of the claims being made about 2016 being unique when  it came to the famous passing away.

He gave two reasons for this. The first that the post war “baby boomer” generation were having trouble facing up to the fact that they were of an age now where death shouldn’t come as a shock and they were struggling to reconcile that so many of the “great and the good” who had been with them throughout their lives were leaving us. He cited a society where people were less obviously seen as old, but despite the attempts to defy the aging process through things like cosmetic surgery and the type of clothing that my parents would never have worn (even to a fancy dress party!)  in their sixties and seventies, the large majority of celebrity deaths this year had come to people who were, there’s no other way of saying this, old!

The other reason he gave was that the advent of social media has meant that so many people in the world now have the means to react instantly to news as it develops and so the appearance is given in all walks of life, not just celebrity deaths, that there are more “huge events” happening than there used to be.

I wasn’t fully convinced by either argument. For example, social media is hardly a 2016 phenomenon – it’s been around for a decade or more now and I cannot recall another year (in fact it’s less than half of a year) when people have been asking why so many famous people are passing away before.

I’m grateful to the poster on a City messageboard who produced this list of celebrities who have passed away in 2016:-

“Prince, Bowie, Rickman, Corbett, Cruyff,Wood,Daniels, Wogan, Gest, Finlay,Frey”

I daresay there are others some can think of who should be included, but there are some huge names included there who make me think that we are in an exceptional year when it comes to icons passing away  and now we have the greatest icon of them all leaving us as well.

It never ever crossed my mind to do a piece on here remembering any of those names in that list, but, Muhammad Ali was on a different plane than virtually anyone else I have come across in my life.

If I’m being honest, I had got Ali obituary fatigue syndrome by the time I went to bed last night because too many people eulogising about him seemed to be almost reading from a script which allowed no “warts and all” assessments of a man who certainly was not beyond criticism in my opinion.

For example, some of the things I heard him say about women and their role in society struck me as prehistoric, I didn’t like the way he taunted some of his opponents in and out of the ring (Joe Frazier, who was certainly no “Uncle Tom”, was perfectly justified in my view in feeling let down by Ali after the backing he gave him during his exile from boxing) and the fact that he was black shouldn’t be allowed to excuse some of the dubious things he said about race and racial matters.

There's an episode of the West Wing where a decision is made that there was no need to inflict further punishment on a bruised and battered political opponent because the fight had already been won - the gesture being described as the punch that Ali never threw against Foreman as he was falling to the canvas. Ali didn't always behave in a classy fashion inside the ring, but at the single moment which defined his boxing career and in the way he asked refs to stop fights when he knew his opponent had nothing left to give he did do so - he showed the humanity which shone through his life despite the clouds which would occasionally block the sun for a while.

There’s an episode of the West Wing where a decision is made that there is no need to inflict further punishment on a bruised and battered political opponent because the fight has already been won – the gesture being described as the punch that Ali never threw against Foreman as he was falling to the canvas.
Ali didn’t always behave in a classy fashion inside the ring, but at the single moment which defined his boxing career and in the way he asked refs to stop fights when he knew his opponent had nothing left to give, he did do so – he showed the humanity which shone through his life despite the clouds which would occasionally block the sun for a while.

I say that while acknowledging that I have neither the talent nor the skin colour to experience what Ali did in 1960 when he returned home having won an Olympic gold medal for his country, only to be told it made no difference to where he was allowed to eat in the city of his birth – such treatment has to partially explain, at least, why his life panned out the way it did.

The greatest mistake Ali made though was to keep on fighting for another seven years after beating George Foreman in what was, for me, his greatest bout. If Ali had stuck to his promise that the “Rumble in the Jungle” would be his last fight, then we would all have experienced so much more of the mesmerising (in so many ways), brave, truly gifted, handsome and brilliant man who, probably more than any other person, came to represent the sixties and seventies.

Whether you use sport, politics, entertainment, integrity or whatever else you want as your criteria, the name of Muhammad Ali would be at or near the top of any list of major influences during those couple of decades when so much changed in the world – in those years before we became a global village, Ali was undoubtedly the most recognisable face on the planet.

It was truly dispiriting to see what Parkinson’s disease did to this giant of a man in the second half of his life. Whether boxing was the cause of it or not (as a non expert, I happen to believe it was),  Parkinson’s robbed all of us of so much because “retirement” for a man such as Ali would surely not have meant the virtual anonymity of the past thirty years if he had enjoyed better health.

I have to qualify that word “anonymity” with “virtual” there though because those too young to have seen him at his best, in and out of the ring, still had that unforgettable image of him lighting the Olympic flame in 1996 to remember as an example of his bravery and willpower.

So, goodbye to someone who I always regarded as a friend even though I doubt it if I’ve ever got within one hundred miles of where he was  at any particular time – he was, simply, the greatest human being of my lifetime.

RIP Muhammad Ali.

Posted in R.I.P. | Tagged | 2 Comments