A different kind of boycott?

Posted on November 25, 2014 by The other Bob Wilson

CoymayI’ve made reference to Vincent Tan and that night in January 2012 when we beat Crystal Palace to reach the League Cup Final once or twice on here before, but it is something that I do wonder about from time to time as I consider what has happened to the club since then. Tan was at Wembley to watch us take on Blackpool in the 2010 Play Off Final, but I think I’m right in saying that he did not go to another City match after that until that night against Palace – it was therefore his first visit to Cardiff City Stadium for a game.

What an occasion it was for his first home game as well and it was topped off by the tumultuous reception Tan and former Chairman TG got as they walked around the pitch after the match. Someone with Vincent Tan’s wealth is not going to want for much in life, but I can’t help thinking he had not experienced anything like that walk around the pitch before in his life – to have 90% of a crowd of about 26,000 treating you like a hero must be an exhilarating feeling and such was the goodwill shown towards the man who was widely credited with saving the club, that he could have been forgiven for thinking that he would have the Cardiff fanbase right behind him for the duration of his relationship with the club.

Within about six weeks, City’s owner had taken the decision to become more “hands on” at the club and it wasn’t long before we learned the consequences of this decision – would we have remained just another one of Mr Tan’s projects that he was prepared to leave in the hands of others if it had not been for what he experienced on his first visit to a game in Cardiff? I think we might well have done.

There may have been those among the 24,000 or so City fans in the crowd that night who have never wanted Vincent Tan involved with the club and refused to join in with the applause he received, but they can’t have amounted to many and I’d bet virtually all of those who now despise the man so much were there cheering him to the echo.

Our owner would have had to be a very odd person indeed if he didn’t want to experience more occasions like the one he had been through after the Palace game and, surely, such thoughts would have been going through his mind as he set the wheels in motion for the change of kit and badge that was to completely change the way he was perceived, not just in Cardiff, but throughout the football world.

It has been said that Tan took soundings off people at the club about the impact that the rebrand would have, but, based on what we have seen over the last two and a half years or so, I’m not sure anything that indicated there would be problems would have been listened to. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty convinced Tan thought he was fireproof at Cardiff and so the process which has torn the club asunder (that may sound overly dramatic, but I strongly believe it to be true) kicked into motion.

From this - Vincent Tan and TG bask in the applause of grateful City fans after their club had beaten Crystal Palace in the League Cup Semi Final in January 2012.*

From this – Vincent Tan and TG bask in the applause of grateful City fans after their club had beaten Crystal Palace in the League Cup Semi Final in January 2012.*

Trying to leave personal feelings out of this and attempting to be objective, there have been two things that I contend have blighted the period since our owner became more hands on, one of which he could do little about in the short to medium term and the other something that could have been avoided. Firstly, right from his first public pronouncements about the club, it’s been  pretty clear that he knew little about the game of football, both on and off the pitch, and, more importantly, what the local football club means to the area in which it is based and how much things, which may not mean much to an outsider, are valued by those that follow it – this is not a peculiarly British thing, but, when it comes to their football club, even the most progressive and flexible individuals tend to turn into dyed in the wool traditionalists!

Secondly, the insistence on not using people with football financial management experience in senior administrative positions at the club has been at the root of problems such as the row over transfer spending in the summer of 2013 when you would like to think the whole mess could have been nipped in the bud with an intervention from a CEO who knew how football budgets worked.

Going back to the first of these points, Vincent Tan could not be blamed for his lack of relevant knowledge back in 2012, but, even if you accept his contention in this article last month (which I don’t) that ” I think I can run and manage a football club very well.”, this newly acquired knowledge does not stretch to an understanding of his football club’s heritage and traditions that I talked about earlier and this, I believe, is what is at the heart of the complete breakdown of the relationship between owner and supporters that is killing the club I love.

The really sad thing about this is that I’m sure that Vincent Tan and all of the club’s supporters would both dearly like to have more nights like that League Cup Semi Final nearly three years ago, but whereas 20,000 plus want us to be playing in blue when they occur, one man insists we will be in red and the passing of time is, if anything, hardening his stance.

Certainly, the words ““What else can the fans do? They just don’t support, it’s not going to change a lot” taken from the Guardian article linked above sound like someone who believes he has won the battle over the rebrand, but if he truly feels he has, why is he so reluctant  to come to a City match this season?

To this - Vincent Tan is booed by home supporters after the win over Fulham in March (does anyone really believe the reaction would be any different if he turned up against Rotherham in eleven days time and did the same thing again?)*

To this – Vincent Tan is booed by home supporters after the win over Fulham in March (does anyone really believe the reaction would be any different if he turned up against Rotherham in eleven days time and did the same thing again?)*

I know there was talk of him having a minor operation a while ago, but the interview he had with Sky Sports News a couple of months back included clips of Mr Tan swimming in the ocean off the Malaysian coast and around the same time the Echo reported he had confirmed he would be coming to Cardiff sometime in October, so it would appear that whatever health issues he had are not keeping him from coming to matches and yet he still hasn’t done so.

I’ll be putting a theory forward as to why this is happening shortly, but I’d like to set a bit of a background to it first. Early on in the 2012/13 season, there was not much blue being worn by fans at all in the stadium at all, but someone at the club (I have strong suspicions as to who!) decided that things weren’t red enough and decided to give everyone attending a game in February 2013 a free red scarf. Maybe it was a coincidence, but, ever since then, the number of people wearing blue to games has gradually been rising until we have reached the current situation whereby seeing someone wearing red (especially this season’s shirt) is a novelty.

Now there are those who maintain that wearing blue to games has had no impact whatsoever, but I have always thought that Vincent Tan has been surprisingly thin skinned about this – I think seeing lots of blue and hearing anti rebrand songs genuinely annoys him.

If Vincent Tan once had visions of entertaining the elite of Malaysian  society while his football team took on and beat the best teams in the Premier League with City in their red shirts and thousands of supporters wearing the same colour as they sang his name, then he must know now that it isn’t going to happen. Given the way his expensively assembled team are performing, the only way we are going to see a Premier League side playing at Cardiff in the next eighteen months is if we draw one in one of the cup competitions or play one in a pre season friendly and while the team might still be in red, the supporters resolutely stick to blue – as for singing his name, that may happen, but there’ll be plenty of expletives to go with it as well.

No, as the natives grew more restless and stroppy as the campaign went on and his team sunk to their relegation with barely a whimper, 2013/14 didn’t work out like it was supposed to for Mr Tan – he became someone to be ridiculed in the media and not even his subsequent partial vindication in the dispute with Messrs Mackay and Moody has really changed this. Yet, despite everything, in his recent media pronouncements, Tan has sounded like someone who has routed his enemies, be they supporters of the club he owns or former managers and other club employees.

If this is the case, then perhaps Mr Tan might like to test whether he is right by actually coming along to a game. If he did, I think one of two things would happen. Either he would be greeted by a crowd that would be fired up by the prospect of finally being able to unload this season’s frustrations on him (large numbers of them would be wearing blue and singing unflattering songs about him) or he would be greeted by an apathetic crowd (mostly wearing blue) that only roused themselves for the 19.27 chorus of we’ll always be blue as they watched a side where the whole is a great deal less than the sum of their parts go about trying to prove that football is not part of the entertainment business. Either way, Mr Tan would probably conclude that he’d be better off giving Cardiff City Stadium a wide berth for the foreseeable future as he resumes the boycott he started in August of the dysfunctional club he has created.

* pictures courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/people/joncandy/

 

Posted in Up in the Boardroom | Tagged | 8 Comments

Sleep inducing win demonstrates differences between professionals and punters.

Posted on November 22, 2014 by The other Bob Wilson

CoymayI’m pretty sure that the large majority of people who get to read this piece will be united by the fact that they are Cardiff City fans, but ask them what they want from their team and I reckon you’ll get some widely differing answers.

For example, this time last year I was genuinely baffled by messageboard moans about City not being entertaining enough. I just couldn’t get my head around why, in a season that was always going to be a struggle, people would except a team that had got promoted playing effective, but pragmatic football to suddenly transform themselves into great entertainers.

Perhaps my unsympathetic feelings towards those craving Premier League wins and entertainment owed a lot to the sort of supporter I am. I make no apologies for being a Cardiff City fan first and foremost – to me this means that, while I like being entertained while watching us win, it is the win that definitely matters most to me. There are plenty of other games on the television nowadays I can look at if I want to be entertained by a football match, but, when my team is playing, getting the three points take priority.

I guess this means my attitude is more akin to the one you’ll find among those paid by the club when compared to many others in our fanbase in that I’d often look to defend the team against charges of not being entertaining enough. However, even I’ll admit after last night’s mind numbing 2-1 win over Reading at Cardiff City Stadium that anyone complaining about a lack of thrills and spills has a point!

So, in this case, I find myself at odds with the professionals. Now, generally I believe that the opinions of people whose livelihood depends on the results their team get tend to be more realistic and sensible than the punter (many of whom are in a slightly inebriated state when watching a game!) who can, understandably, be guilty of seeing everything in purely black and white terms, but I do wonder if last night it was the pros who were misjudging things and it was the watching public who did a better job of judging what was happening during the half time interval last night.

As Russell Slade gave his half time team talk he did so knowing his team had a 2-0 lead against opponents whose recent away record of only one draw in their last six matches in all competitions is even worse than ours. Not only that, Reading were going to have to play the second half with only ten men after the red card shown to the unfortunate Alex Pearce who had made a realistic claim to being City’s man of the match by contributing an own goal, conceding  the penalty from which Peter Whittingham made it 2-0 and   then being red carded!

 

Reading's Alex Pearce completes a horrendous forty five minutes by receiving a red card for a foul on Adam LeFondre.*

Reading’s Alex Pearce completes a horrendous forty five minutes by receiving a red card for a foul on Adam LeFondre.*

With City being the epitome of mid table mediocrity going into the game (six wins, six defeats and a goal difference of 0), it just seemed to me that a Reading team that were probably fearing a thrashing as they had their half time oranges represented an ideal opportunity to boost that goal difference to the sort of levels that might work to City’s advantage in a tight finish to the season. Yes, City would need to be vigilant at the back still, but if they showed belief, decisiveness, a degree of patience and teamwork, then the win would take care of itself and there should have been more goals along the way.

However, it was very interesting to hear our manager use the term “solid, professional performance” twice in the first minute of the post match interview which is on the club’s official site. The “job done” quote that quickly followed only added to my feeling that it was the goal conceded late on, rather than the failure to take the opportunity to really put an opponent to the sword that had been presented to his team, which most bothered him – if the match had finished 2-0, he would have been satisfied.

Now, to be fair to Slade, I can’t say for sure that his instructions for the second half didn’t include something about there being the chance for a really big win for his side if they went about things the proper way. After all, it seems to me that the best way to capitalise on a man advantage you may have over your opponents is to tire them out by switching the ball from one side of the pitch to the other and, generally, move them around – I’d say this is something that we, mostly, tried to do after the break.

Maybe this is showing my different thinking to other fans again, but I have no problem with the moving them around bit if it includes making the other side push men forward by playing the ball backwards. Therefore, I was not one of those who were getting wound up by us not knocking the ball forward at the first opportunity – if the ball had to go backwards or sideways, so be it.

 

Peter Whittingham comfortably makes it 2-0 from the penalty spot - given the situation City found themselves in after this goal, the game should never have panned out as it did.*

Peter Whittingham comfortably makes it 2-0 from the penalty spot – given the situation City found themselves in after this goal, the game should never have panned out as it did.*

However, among many things that frustrated me last night was that, as we often do, we appeared to run out of patience after a fairly short bout of possession football and then resorted to a “fighting ball” forward – if the plan is to play a certain way, then why don’t City stick to it? Whether it be a long ball game or a more possession based one is not the main issue here in my book, it’s the way we seem to switch from one to the other so randomly – I accept that a team that “mixes things up” can be a successful one, but it always appears so haphazard with us and it seems to me what was needed last night especially was for us to choose the option which best suited the situation and stick to it.

I should emphasise that, despite the poor performance by City, they did have their chances in the second half, but the way they often reacted when they came along only tended to add to the impression that this group of players are not going to be realistic challengers for a top six finish this season. I say that because, whenever a promising situation would develop, the attitude seemed to be “every man for himself” (this was equally true in the first half). All of our front four of LeFondre, Macheda, Noone and Pilkington were guilty of ignoring better placed colleagues and taking pot shots at goal that never looked like going in on at least one occasion – maybe I’m misreadings things here, but that hardly suggests that all is well on the team spirit front at Cardiff currently.

However, given what we are seeing from our two strikers lately, maybe it’s understandable that our wingers are taking things on themselves. Adam LeFondre was given the sponsor’s Man of the Match award and, fair play to him, he did win the penalty as well as make a lot of unselfish runs. This compared favourably with his striking colleague, who I’m afraid contributes very little if he is not scoring. The smaller LeFondre is marginally the more effective of the two in trying to make something of those fighting balls I mentioned earlier, but the LeFondre/Macheda partnership has had seven games together now and I still don’t see any evidence of them developing anything to remotely resemble the Clark/Toshack. Alston/Evans, Gilligan/Bartlett and Bothroyd/Chopra or McCormack type combinations we’ve seen down the years at the club.

There will be those who read this and think I’m being overly negative, but I believe I’m being realistic. The pro’s will talk about taking three more points and moving on from here, but last night was so much harder than you would expect it to by for a side that earns so much more than many other recent outfits that would have have comfortably cruised to something like a 3-0 win if they had found themselves in the sort of half time situation we saw last night. The 12/13 side mastered the art of winning when not playing well and we saw the current side do that last night, but, for me, any resemblance between the two ends there – the Championship winning side did not need victories scraped by an own goal and a penalty against ten men to win while playing poorly, they had a steel and spirit which puts this lot to shame.

If our manager and players really do think it was a case of “job done” last night, then I believe they are deluding themselves – supporters of a team might think and react differently to the same situation, but their instincts are generally reliable and I’m struggling to remember a time when the atmosphere felt so flat when leaving the ground after a win. I still think there are off field matters which are a big contributory factor towards the downbeat mood at the ground these days, but a chance to restore some much needed feelgood factor to supporters of Cardiff City was missed last night through what seems to me to be a combination of a lack of belief and ability.

* pictures courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/joncandy/with/15845235021/

Posted in Out on the pitch | Tagged , , | 7 Comments