Weekly review 22/5/2016.

CoymayWell, it was Paul Trollope then. When the news came on Wednesday that the former Bristol Rovers manager was to be the man charged with overseeing Cardiff City’s 2016/17 season, it was regarded as such an inevitability that the lack of “pomp and ceremony” which accompanied it seemed so appropriate.

Of course, there will be those who will say that the low key nature in which the news was broken, and then received by City fans, was wholly appropriate – after all, this was the club which made one of the most low key managerial appointments in ages only eighteen months ago offering up more of the same.

To a large extent, I said all I wanted to say about Paul Trollope as a new City “manager” in my piece last week and this one will be more about where do we go from here really. However, I do want to mention that my view is that low key doesn’t have to mean bad and, having got to know and hear a bit more about the man in the last seven days, I’m more optimistic than I was that Trollope can do a good job as the man in charge of the footballing side of things at Cardiff.

One thing which occurred to me for the first time on hearing news of his appointment was that I couldn’t remember Paul Trollope talking in public once since he arrived at Cardiff – I must have heard an interview with him when he was at Bristol Rovers at some time or another, but it didn’t make any impression on me.

Now, in the past, I would have said I would have said I couldn’t really care less how a City manager came over when speaking in public as long as he was doing a decent job for the club where it really counts, but that was in the days before Alan Cork.

Apparently, Cork was one of those players who is portrayed as being good for team morale because he is one of the dressing room jokers. At Wimbledon, he was considered one of the primary reasons for the “Crazy gang” tag which became a virtual trademark of theirs while they were tweaking the noses of the elite for more than a decade during the eighties or nineties.

Cork was a funny man it seems, but it was never a talent which manifested itself in his media appearances during his time as Cardiff manager. Not to put too fine a point on it, Alan Cork was very poor at media relations – at times, he came over as being virtually monosyllabic.

City were the league’s leading scorers in winning promotion from what is now called League Two in 2001 under Cork’s management and the man deserved credit for turning around the fortunes of a talented squad which had been under performing before his appointment.

Should how a manager performs in front of the media be a contributory factor towards sacking him? Alan Cork's struggles in that department as City boss fifteen years ago, make me, reluctantly, believe that they should in this day and age.

Should how a manager performs in front of the media be a contributory factor towards sacking him? Alan Cork’s struggles in that department as City boss fifteen years ago make me, reluctantly, believe that they should in this day and age.

However, there was a feeling abroad at the time that virtually anyone could have got us promoted that season given the amount of money we were spending compared to others in that division and, when the spending increased dramatically in the third tier, there was a notion that nothing but promotion would do for Alan Cork.

I was among very many City fans who was not convinced by Cork at League One level and welcomed his dismissal when it came, but, in a funny way, I didn’t like myself much for wanting the man sacked because I had to admit that one of the reasons for this was that he was so poor in front of the cameras and microphone.

So, going back to Paul Trollope, I was a little concerned that I’d not heard anything from him in public because I figured that one of the last things someone who needed to be able to convince sceptical City fans that he was the right man for the job wanted was a weak media presence.

A bit of research on a Bristol Rovers messageboard reassured me to the extent that, generally speaking, the reviews of him as a manager of their club tended to be pretty positive. There were critical opinions of him, but I’d say there was something like a 2:1 ratio in the “did a decent/good job” camp to the “was an awful manager” one.

Among the criticisms of him though was that the football his team played was generally effective, but dull and I saw the word “mogadon” being applied to the style of football played under him and, on one occasion, to how he came across when interviewed.

Having now heard Paul Trollope speak as City’s new (and old!) Head Coach, I can, to a degree, understand that mogadon comment. Trollope certainly didn’t come over as poorly as Alan Cork did, but, whereas one of his predecessors, Malky Mackay, was able to get the media eating from his hand after his first press conference as City manager and generally said all of the right things to get fans onside, it was hard to imagine him convincing those sceptics I mentioned earlier with the power of his oratory.

Adequate, but no more than that, was how I would describe Paul Trollope’s performance in his first meet the media appearance as Cardiff boss – I’d put him around mid table when it came to City managers as public speakers.

One of the men I’d have above Trollope in that table would be Lennie Lawrence, who always came across as being completely at home in front of the media. It was interesting, as well as fairly predictable, therefore to see the man who was in charge here for three years from 2002 being linked with a return to Cardiff in the kind of father figure/advisory role he had with Trollope at Bristol Rovers.

Lawrence held similar positions when working with Dougie Freedman at Palace, Bolton and Forest and it’s worth remembering that he was hired initially at Cardiff fourteen years ago as a “consultant” who would work with Alan Cork.

In many ways, bringing in a senior and respected figure like Lennie Lawrence would be a good move by City in my opinion, but you would have to wonder where it would leave former manager Russell Slade?

Mention of our “Head of Football” brings me on to the oft repeated line which goes “nothing has really changed at Cardiff except that Trollope and Slade have swapped jobs”. This viewpoint (which, incidentally, is not strictly true – Slade has a new job title, while Trollope’s is the same as it’s always been!) has it that it will be business as usual at City with little or no real change to what we’ve seen in the past eighteen months or so.

People who feel that way claim the news that, apparently, his employers at City are willing to allow Trollope to continue with his work with the Welsh squad supports their position – Slade will still, effectively, be calling the shots on the playing side when it comes to the first team and it will be business as usual during international breaks when Trollope is absent.

Maybe they are right, but I don’t believe that they are – my guess is that briefings being given by the club about Slade playing no further part in first team matters are the truth. Indeed, whether they are true or not, I feel the recent stories linking Russell Slade with the vacant manager’s job at Blackburn offer the clue that our former manager’s lifespan at Cardiff is likely to be a fairly limited one.

If Paul Trollope is going to be allowed to continue in his Wales role, then I’m sure it will be a subject that is raised if or when we make a stuttering start to the new season and the first international break comes along.

I am tempted at this point to say that, in my youth, Dave Bowen was able to take Northampton Town from Division Four to Division One while also managing Wales, but I suppose those who say that it’s a completely different world now compared to fifty years ago do have a point.

Therefore, the identity of the new appointments, which Paul Trollope said were imminent, among his support staff becomes very important. For me, someone like Lennie Lawrence would be a safe pair of hands who could oversee a lot of the Head Coach job demands while Trollope is away and one or two quality additions to the coaching staff could ensure that things would be able to tick over well enough during those periods in the season when the first team aren’t playing.

Whether it be regular season or international break time, one person who will not be involved with the first team any more is Scott Young – he’s another one who will still be employed at the club, but as to how he’ll be involved, your guess is as good as mine,

Not surprisingly, things are pretty quiet on the transfer rumour front right now – I mentioned our reported interest in Norwich’s Alexander Tettey last week and the only player I’ve seen linked with us in the past week is also at that club.

A serious contender for the award of best loan player I've seen at Cardiff. Gary O'Neill was superb in his two month loan spell at City in 04/05 and was well on the way to turning around our season when his form prompted Portsmouth to recall him and install him in their Premier League team - I doubt he could prove as influential for us now as he was back then,*

A serious contender for the award of best loan player I’ve seen at Cardiff. Gary O’Neill was superb in his two month spell at City in 04/05 and was well on the way to turning around our season when his form prompted Portsmouth to recall him and install him in their Premier League team – I doubt he could prove as influential for us now as he was back then,*

I would have loved us to have signed Gary O’Neill permanently after he had played so well for us during his loan spell here back in 2004 – in fact I would have immediately installed him as club captain and started to build a side for the next five years around him if it had been my choice to make.

Having just turned thirty three, I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about O’Neill coming here now, but I suppose that, if one of our targets for the new season is a leader in the middle of the park, we could look to him as a short term fix.

If the local press are to be believed, Paul Trollope has three main targets for the new season – that leader type in  central midfield, a winger who will add pace to the squad and, hardly surprisingly, a goal scorer. Chairman Mehmet Dalman has said that there will be funds available to Trollope when it comes to recruiting new players, but I can’t help thinking that the transfer kitty is going to have to be boosted significantly by wage bill savings as a result of player departures if we are going to have a reasonable chance of succeeding in finding someone who scores at the sort of rate that will help us make the transition from Play Off hopefuls to serious contenders.

Whether those wage bill savings can be achieved is certainly debatable. This week, Tom Adeyemi joined Adam LeFondre as someone who will not be signing for the club they have spent the season on loan at.

On the face of it, I find it very hard to come up with many players who would be likely to return to the clubs they’ve been loaned to if the opportunity arose. I’m pretty sure Justin Edinburgh would have Deji Oshilaja back at Gillingham if he could and the same could probably be said about Semi Ajayi at Crewe, Declan John at Chestefield and, maybe, Tommy O’Sullivan at Newport.

The thing is though that the departure of such players would send out completely the wrong signals at a club which is, supposedly, looking towards youth again after a period where including a twenty five year old in the first team was seen as a move fraught with danger amid fears that they weren’t quite ready yet!

Not only that, the wage savings to be made from such moves would be pretty small. No, the departures have to be from that pretty large rump of senior players who are costing the club a lot and, in most cases, doing little to justify all of the expense.

Maybe, Reading’s reported interest in LeFondre will come to something, I suppose Preston could be interested in getting Eoin Doyle back on a permanent basis and there may be some Italian team desperate enough to take Federico Macheda off our hands, However, I can’t help thinking that we’re going to have to be looking at letting regular members of last season’s first team squad like David Marshall and Bruno Manga go to help finance the sort of signings which stand a chance of bringing lost fans back and convincing those who are not enthused by Paul Trollope’s appointment.

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

 

Posted in Down in the dugout, Out on the pitch | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Weekly review 15/5/16.

Coymay

Over the past few years, there have been times when I’ve done one of these weekly reviews, especially shortly after the last match of the old season had been played, and thought “was it really worth me doing that?” to myself because, in essence, all I’d done is just padded out some, inaccurate as it invariably turned out, transfer gossip – I don’t get that feeling at all this week.

The search for a new (or will he be new?) Head Coach goes on and I’ll return to that shortly with some words about the man who is the overwhelming bookies favourite to be named currently, but I’ve got to start with the concrete news that we’ve already made our first signing of the close season.

After Russell Slade had spoken following the Birmingham match last week with plenty of confidence about the chances of Lex Immers turning his loan move into a permanent one, it didn’t surprise me at all to hear the announcement that the twenty nine year old Dutch midfield player had joined us from Feyenoord on a two year deal.

It’s early days in his Cardiff career yet, but, so far at least, Immers has maintained the one goal every three matches scoring rate which marked his time with the Rotterdam team (actually, he scored thirty one times in hundred matches for Feyenoord according to Wikipedia).

I can remember watching a You Tube video showing Immers in goalscoring action for Feyenoord and his first club, Den Haag, and being struck by how “ordinary” they all looked. There was barely anything there that would remotely qualify as spectacular and this trend has continued so far at Cardiff, with all five of his goals for us up to now being close to tap ins – his only goal so far at Cardiff City Stadium, against Brighton, from about twelve yards out being the closest thing to a long range strike up to now.

Immers’ goals always look so simple to score that you wonder why other midfield men who also play in advanced areas behind the main striker(s) cannot match his scoring rate. However, the more I watch him, the more I think that our newest signing is a very intelligent player who has the knack of finding pockets of space, be it in the penalty area to score or in that area behind the striker(s) in general play to use simple, but effective passes. which can truly hurt opponents.

The news that as many as six other Championship clubs were also keen on signing Immers shouldn’t come as a surprise. Obviously, they’d also noticed that this sometimes ordinary looking player has a knack of influencing matches with his goals, key passes, work rate and ability to make the opposition’s sitting midfield man’s life more awkward that it has often been in the past against Cardiff.

It’s got a lot more difficult in recent years to make an educated guess as to how much an “undisclosed fee” was likely to be in reality. For example, Immers’ stock had fallen a lot at Feyenoord and I’m not sure how long he had left on his contract there. These are factors which could have driven Immers’ transfer fee down, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have paid our largest transfer fee since the arrival of Bruno Manga about twenty months ago for him.

If I’m right there, I wouldn’t take that as evidence of us going on a spending spree, when compared to what’s happened since September 2014 at least, this summer, but bringing Lex Immers to the club is, for me, a very encouraging start to our transfer dealings before Championship football begins again.

Maybe Immers will eventually be viewed at Cardiff in the same way as he was by many supporters in his latter days at Feyenoord. That is, as something of a clumsy oaf who had become an embarrassment to the team, but his game would have to fall away very, very dramatically from the level shown in his first four months at City for that to happen – for now, Immers remains a very pleasant surprise who is teaching me that I shouldn’t place as much value on what the fans of the club a transfer target of ours plays for say about him.

The Immers signing went ahead at a time when we didn’t have a person in charge on the playing side at the club. This may mean that “non football” people like Ken Choo, Mehmet Dalman and Vincent Tan had pushed through the deal (as they appeared to do with the loan signing of Ravel Morrison in the days after Ole left), but it could also signify that the new Head Coach is already at the club and given his blessing to it.

Although he was born in Swindon, Paul Trollope won nine caps for Wales and one thing his selection as the new Head Coach would do is make a club that has looked decidedly unWelsh in recent seasons marginally less so.

Although he was born in Swindon, Paul Trollope won nine caps for Wales and one thing his selection as the new Head Coach would do is make a club that has looked decidedly unWelsh in recent seasons (at first team level anyway), marginally less so.

In fact, when you consider that he was a 6/1 on favourite to be appointed with one firm of bookies last night, it may well be that our new Head Coach will be the man who currently has the job title anyway!

Paul Trollope has always been pretty high up on any list of candidates to replace Russell Slade that has been drawn up in the last ten days or so. He fits the bill as described by the club in the statement breaking the news of Russell Slade stepping aside to the extent that he is young, by the terms of coaching and managerial jobs in football at least, at forty three and, although I tend to pay very little attention to how much our manager is jumping about in the dug out during a match, he does appear to be more “dynamic” than Russell Slade was –  he also has some previous managerial experience having, by all accounts, done a decent job at Bristol Rovers from 2005 to 2010.

Whether Trollope is “stats driven” or not, I don’t know, but, as it’s impossible for anyone to be less encouraging when it comes to youth development at Cardiff than Russell Slade was, he could certainly be spun by the club as ticking that particular box.

For me, it’s beyond argument that we started playing better quality football from the moment Paul Trollope was appointed in February of last year. Whether this was all down to him or not, I can’t say, but it would certainly appear that he is highly regarded in the game, so I wouldn’t be annoyed if it did turn out that he was, effectively, given the job of managing Cardiff City.

However, I would not be excited by the appointment either and there’s no way that I can see Paul Trollope being named as Russell Slade’s replacement leading to an increase in season ticket sales this summer – this would certainly happen with one or two of the names on those lists I mentioned earlier in charge.

It’s impossible to know just how influential Paul Trollope was when he was the number two to Russell Slade. As mentioned before, we did play better football as soon as he arrived and, unlike in 14/15, we did provide some entertainment at times last season.

There was always a tendency among many fans to credit anything good we did to Trollope and everything bad we did to Slade in the time they worked together. However, the truth as I see it is that, even if you are prepared to say Trollope should take most of the credit for the fact that we were not boring mid table nobodies last season like we were a year earlier, we were hardly great entertainers playing progressive football either – there was a caution in our approach whether we played at home or away and our lack of attacking pace was never fully addressed.

So, there has to be a suspicion at least that a Trollope appointment would mean more of the largely turgid stuff we played under Slade. This only increases the feeling that many supporters will ask “so, what’s really changed?” if the new Head Coach turns out to be the old one – it may be that this will be seen to be a completely unfair charge in time, but, for now, there are surely going to be many who will think that one yes man was being replaced by another one.

That last point goes right to the heart of the matter which is always going to dominate at Cardiff for the foreseeable future – what does Vincent Tan think?

I see that the club are saying that they’ve been approached by eighteen people enquiring about the new job. This seemed to be portrayed by them as an impressive figure, whereas my first reaction to reading it was to think it was about two or three times less than the number you would have thought there’d be at a club which stayed in the hunt for a Premier League place until the penultimate match of the season.

I still say that, rightly or wrongly, a lot of managers/coaches who would be interested in a job at Cardiff under different circumstances, will not be because Vincent Tan is in charge here. Furthermore, my feeling is that our owner is not too bothered at all with such a state of affairs, because he would have little intention of appointing these, often, more high profile individuals anyway even if they did apply.

A Paul Trollope appointment would be seen as further evidence that our owner is still heavily influenced by the latter days of the Malky Mackay era when Mr Tan felt his trust had been seriously betrayed by his manager.

I firmly believe that there are not many “football people” Mr Tan is prepared to put his trust in now and so it’s hardly surprising that when he does find someone in the game who he feels he can work with, he is inclined to show them a lot of loyalty (I still think that at most other clubs Russell Slade would have been sacked ten days ago rather than having a new post created for him).

Maybe Vincent Tan will shock me and many others by showing that he is prepared to look outside the small group of trusted lieutenants he has in football, but, if he doesn’t, then I’d say Paul Trollope is probably the best appointment he can make, but it still feels to me that his club is being kept in some sort of footballing straitjacket by this inability to look beyond the trusted few.

Alexander Tettey celebrates his winning goal for Norwich at Old Trafford in December. At the start of the season, he was being named as Norwich's most important player by the Daily Telegraph, now it appears that they are willing to let him go for nothing. Even so, it's hard to see any truth in this week's rumours linking him to City.

Alexander Tettey celebrates his winning goal for Norwich at Old Trafford in December. At the start of the season, he was being named as Norwich’s most important player by the Daily Telegraph, now it appears that they are willing to let him go for nothing. Even so, it’s hard to see any truth in this week’s rumours linking him to City.

Anyway, having mentioned transfer speculation right at the start, I should remark upon the couple of items which have surfaced in the past week. Firstly, Bruno Manga’s agent Yvan Le Mee was quoted as saying “All I can tell you is that Premier League clubs are interested.With what he showed at Cardiff for two years, it is logical that Bruno is attracting the interest of the world.”.

Those words have prompted rumours that Swansea, Palace and West Ham are looking at the Gabon international centreback. Now, based on how Bruno performed at Sheffield Wednesday and when he came on against Birmingham, I think he’d be lucky indeed to end up at one of those clubs next season, but I’ve always thought that he could well leave us this summer because he is one of a number of first team squad members whose deals with the club are up in a year’s time – some of the others in that category would be more willing to commit to Cardiff again than Bruno would I suspect.

As for players coming in, we’ve been linked with Norwich’s Alexander Tettey who, it’s being reported, is going to be released by the East Anglian club who were relegated (along with Newcastle) in the week. On the face of it, Tettey would be a good signing for us, but we could expect plenty of competition from other clubs in the Championship (and, maybe, higher) who’d be interested in him – also, I’m pretty sure that he, like Lex Immers, would do nothing to increase the amount of attacking pace in the squad.

Finally, a few words about the Championship Play Offs. The first legs of the Semi Finals have already taken place and it looks like we will be seeing an all Yorkshire Final. Sheffield Wednesday were 2-0 winners over Brighton at Hillsborough on Friday night – not all over by any means, but with Brighton having not scored against Wednesday in three meetings this season now and having lost four of their players with injuries which threaten to keep them out of tomorrow’s return leg, it’s hard to see them turning the deficit around.

The other tie looks even more cut and dried after Hull’s 3-0 win at Derby yesterday lunchtime where I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether it was Hull’s brilliance or Derby’s ineptitude that was responsible for an away win which was as comprehensive as the scoreline suggests. However, having seemingly turned things around after their defeat here at the beginning of last month, the Championship’s biggest spending outfit showed all of the lack of unity which had me thinking a few weeks back that they were the team we could overhaul in the top six.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Down in the dugout, Out on the pitch, The Championship, Up in the Boardroom | Tagged , , | 12 Comments