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?
