Seven decades of Cardiff City v Burnley matches.

Posted on March 3, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

A 3-0 defeat by Preston in the Cup on Saturday will have dented Burnley’s aura of defensive impregnability, but not shattered it as their team at Deepdale showed nine changes from their previous league game, so it bore little resemblance to the team which has not conceded a league goal since a 2-1 win over Watford four days before Christmas.

City will go into the tomorrow’s game with the players that have accrued a truly remarkable record of just nine goals conceded in thirty four league games boosted by having kept a very rare clean sheet (only their second in the league since late October) in their win over Hull last week. However, having said in my piece on the Villa game that the only way City would have progressed to the Quarter Finals of the FA Cup was via penalties following a 0-0 draw, logic dictates that a goalless draw is the only outcome that will see us avoiding defeat tomorrow.

City barely ever looked like scoring on Friday and it’s been the same whenever we’ve come up against one of Leeds, Sheffield United, Burnley and Sunderland, the four teams that have dominated this season’s Championship. Yes, we did win away agaainst a shadow Sheffield United side in the Third Round of the Cuo, but we’re lost our five league games against the top four by an embarrassing aggregate of 18-0 with the narrowest margin of defeat being 2-0.

As it turns out, Yakou Meite came as close as anyone to coming up with a goal in these matches when he hit the Burnley upright when he should really have scored up at Turf Moor back in August. We were 1-0 down at the time, but were on top and playing well in one of the weirdest games I’ve seen where Burnley went on to win 5-0 despite having just four on target efforts and an expected goals figu=re of less than one!

Leaving the scoreline to one side, Burnley still ended up worthy winners, but I always felt we were “in the game” more in that one than we ever were in the other four matches we’ve played against the leading quartet and so I don’t completely rule out the goalless draw or even us managing to breach the Burnley defence, but, surely, it would be just the once if that happened – an away win has to be, by some distance, the most likely outcome and I wouldn’t be too disappointed with a narrow loss in which we competed better against a leading side than we have done up to now.

Tomorrow is another one of those games where anything we pick up will be a bonus, but stronger performances against Burnley and Sunderland on Saturday would make me feel more confident that we can avoid the drop.

Here’s the usual quiz on upcoming opponents with the answers to be posted on here on Wednesday.

60s. There was something which was not unique I’m sure, but definitely quirky about this north eastener’s career which saw him cross into Yorkshire once, but, otherwise he remained within Lancashire. Starting of at Burnley, he played most games for them and scored his goals at a rate he would never repeat at his other three clubs. After nine years at Turf Moor, he moved to ,local rivals (not their most bitter ones) where he continued to play in the top flight and set a club scoring record which can never be beaten. His three years at his second club ended with the move to Yorkshire mentioned above as he dropped down the divisions to play for a team that may be the closest thing we have to a yoyo team between the Championship and League One these days. His final club were sole holders of an enviable scoring record when he signed for them, but now they share it with another club and it’s surely going to be an awful long time before they get a chance to either match or break it? Who am I describing?

70s. Such was this defender’s desperation to move closer to his native Scotland that he left his first club in London without knowing where Burnley was precisely and he signed for them without bothering with any negotiations about his wages. He’d been a bit part player at his first club and, after being given the runaround by an England winger when he made his debut playing out of position at right back, he found it hard to establish himself at his new club. In fact, it wasn’t until his fifth season at Turf Moor that he became a regular in the team, but once he did, he was there for not far short of a decade as he made it to three hundred plus appearances. When his playing days were over, he returned to work for the club for the season when they almost lost their Football League status and he never did make it all the way back to Scotland as he stayed in Burnley until his death a few years ago. Can you name him?

80s. I’m surprised that VAT for couples ends up as a full back! (4.8)

90s. Burnley, briefly during this decade, was the only English club this Scottish midfielder played for in a career lasting seventeen years. He’s probably best known as a manager as he had a lot of success on both sides of the border in his early days before it’s kind of plateaued out in recent years. His career in management can be said to be a strange one as it’s consisted of one spell at two English clubs, three spells at the same Scottish club and he’s currently managing an English club for the third time, who is he?

00s. Baptist adds oomph perhaps!

10s. Starting with the Rebel Army, this defender was loaned out six times in his thirteen years with Burnley for whom he made less than a hundred league appearances – one of them being in a game against City which saw us achieve something we’ve only managed to do twice before in our history. Capped seventeen times by his country, he’s currently playing on the other side of the Atlantic, name him.

20s. Which member of the current Burnley squad played his first game in the EFL while on loan to Newport County from Brentford?

Answers

60s. All four clubs that Jimmy Robson played for began with the letter B. He spent nearly a decade at Burnley racking up over two hundred league appearances and scoring close to eighty goals before a move to Blackpool where he became their first ever substitute to score a goal. His next team was Barnsley and he ended his career at Bury who for over a century had sole possession of the record for the biggest win in an FA Cup Final (6-0 against Derby in 1903) before it was equalled by Man City with their win over Watford in 2019.

70s. Jim Thompson left Chelsea for Burnley in 1968 and, after having to mark Liverpool’s Peter Thompson on his debit in a 4-0 loss at Anfield, it took him until 72/73 to become a first team regular in his preferred position in central defence. Thompson left Burnley in 80/81, but returned to the club as commercial manager for the troubled 86/87 season.

80s. Paul Comstive.

90s. Derek Adams played a couple of games for Burnley in the mid nineties in a playing career spent otherwise in Scotland. As a manager, he’s taken charge of both Ross County and Morecambe three times and had spells with Plymouth and Bradford.

00s. John Spicer.

10s. Kevin Long started his career at Cork City and was at Burnley between 2010 and 2023, he now plays for Toronto FC.

20s. Josh Laurent was loaned to Newport by Brentford in 2015. 

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Cardiff defiant and organised, but never threatening an upset, bow out of the FA Cup.

Posted on March 1, 2025 by The other Bob Wilson

A shorter piece than normal this time because there’s not a great deal to say about Cardiff City’s Fifth Round FA Cup tie against Aston Villa at Villa Park tonight – Villa won in a manner which always suggested they were going through without too many alarms, but a score of 2-0 meant that it was a defeat with some honour for City with two or three very good individual performances along the way for good measure.

With both managers hinting before the game that this was one that they didn’t really need in terms of saving their strongest line ups for other competitions, it was a surprise to see Villa going with not too far short of the strongest team they had available. Although City gave a debut to Dylan Lawlor as one of three centrebacks and included Luey Giles again at left back, they had more experience than I expected with Dimi Goutas back, Aaron Ramsey captaining the side, Chris Willock and Anwar El-Ghazi on the wing and Callum Robinson up front.

Despite the three centrebacks. Giles, like Perry Ng on the right, was very much a full back in what was a rigid 5-4-1 system with Will Fish the other centreback and Rubin Colwill partnering Ramsey in central midfield.

Having spent much of Tuesday night defending, it was more of the same and then some for City as they fought resolutely to keep Villa out for around three quarters of the game, but the lack of attacking threat from them meant that it had looked throughout like the only way they could progress into the Quarter Finals was on penalties after a 0-0 draw.

There were only two occasions when the 6,500 City fans, who gave the team great support throughout, could have been cheering a goal. The first was not too long before half time when Ng went down in the penalty area under a challenge by Lamare Bogarde, but no penalty was forthcoming despite Roy Keene and Ian Wright during the half time break being in agreement that it was the sort of incident where VAR would have upheld a referee’s decision to point to the spot. However, referee Peter Bankes is a regular in the Premier League these days and so the bigger club is always going to be favoured when he does a cup game involving one team from the top flight and another from the EFL – I’m not saying Mr Bankes was outrageously biased or anything, but most of the contentious decisions went Villa’s way.

The only other chance we had really was just before Villa broke the deadlock as superb passes by Fish and Ng gave sub Yousef Salech the chance to slide to get the first touch on the full back’s cross and force Emi Martinez into a diving save.

I mentioned two or three outstanding individual performances by City players and Lee Dixon gave the man of the match award to Ethan Horvarth who, while still making you nervous when the ball’s at his feet, made four or five great saves. Horvarth foiled Ollie Watkins twice and Leon Bailey before half time, but, for me, his two best saves came within a few minutes of each other just after the break as he turned aside shots by John McGinn and Marcus Rashford.

Only one player managed to beat Horvarth, Marco Asensio scoring with similar finishes from around twelve yards in the sixty eighth and eightieth minutes. The first came from a pass from Rashford who looked very close to being offside, but you know these days that VAR gets offside decisions right even if it seems to take something like half an hour to confirm it. The second goal was more straightforward as Asensio fired in from a Bailey cross from the other side of the pitch.

The other outstanding City performance came from Colwill. Craig Bellamy’s lukewarm assessment of Rubin included a suggestion that he could be used in a deeper role than the attacking midfielder position he’s spent most of his career occupying, well he gave the Welsh manager food for thought tonight with a performance which suggested that he may be right about Colwill operating as a number six or eight.

I mentioned earlier that City played a strict 5-4-1 and it’s true to say that El-Ghazi and Willock were more like wing backs than wingers and the same applied to Ramsey and Colwill who rarely moved from the pivot positions.

Therefore much of Colwill’s game was spent without the ball just in front of the back five, but when he could get some possession he provided moments of quality which suggested he could have caused Villa more problems if we could have got a bit more of the ball. The thing that was maybe most impressive about Rubin tonight though was his forty yard run down the right in the ninetieth minute past a couple of opponents before delivering a deep cross which initially drew howls of derision from the home fans until it found its way perfectly to another sub Isaak Davies.

You look at the Welsh team currently and think that it looks much easier for Rubin to get in there as a central midfielder rather than as a number ten – on tonight’s evidence, it might not be  as outlandish as it once seemed to City fans like me who saw him only as a number ten type.

Other players to do well were Fish, who was assured in his passing and defending and Ramsey who provided moments of class in the hour or so he played, while Giles did better than he did at Stoke in the last round and generally came through his contest with Bailey well – Lawlor defended manfully on his first senior appearance, while also playing one or two balls which suggested that he can transfer the passing ability he shows at age group levels into the first team if given more chances.

Just as on Tuesday , the under 21 team were in action on the same day as the first team and the match with Coventry at Leckwith this afternoon was almost a carbon copy of the game at Bristol City three days ago. City again went a goal down from a corner inside the first ten minutes, then Rocco Simic equalised to secure a 1-1 draw. On Tuesday Simic finished in assured fashion with his feet, today it was a header following a good run and cross by Morgan Wigley. Simic has now scored three times in three games for the under 21s and, from what I saw of the match today, there were signs that his all round game is developing as he becomes more used to playing in this country 

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