Having waited for months for transfer speculation to get my teeth into, I fully accept that it makes me look so, so fickle when I now say that I’m now bored by Cardiff City’s pursuit of Tromso’s 20 year old midfielder Jens Hjerto Dahl.
I should emphasise that I don’t blame City in any way for me beginning to think we should start looking elsewhere for the central midfielder which should be our number one priority. After all, it seems pretty clear that that their second bid for Dahl made this week was a significant step up from their earlier one. I don’t pay much attention to the reported size of bids in the media because I don’t trust agents an inch, so, unless the clubs concerned release the actual figures, it seems to me that we’re just dealing in guesswork.
Nevertheless, although our second bid does not appear to have been accepted by Tromso, it has been widely reported that the gap between the two parties was now very small with the main difference being how much of the bid should be in an “up front” payment and how much of it should be in the form of add ons.
Through the last ten days or so I can recall no direct quotes from any one among the City hierarchy about this bid although I think you can be pretty sure that recent reports in the local media about the club being optimistic about how the deal was progressing came from City’s Boardroom or senior administrative staff.
Our interest in Jens Dahl has been in the public domain for close to a fortnight now and, despite City’s reluctance to go public on our link with the player, there has been a constant refrain of quotes from Tromso and from the player himself about the situation – I should add as well that having a club as big as Rangers interested in Dahl means that there’s a constant supply of Scottish media and online fan site stories.stirring the pot as well.
Now, there must be a recognition that we’re talking about someone who was ranked among the 100 best footballers under the age of 20 in the world back in 2024, so City are fishing in a pool that we very rarely see them bothering with here. There is going to be big interest when a player on such a list is likely to be sold before he has passed the age of twenty and, as such, all of this speculation and fansite crap kind of goes with the territory.
However, when you see quotes like this one
“TIL [Tromso] and Cardiff have had a dialogue over a period of time. At the same time, there should be other clubs that are close to the situation, and that means you don’t want to rush into any decision. Nothing has been decided.”
from Tromso’s Sporting Director which surfaced yesterday, you can’t help thinking that we’re being used by that club to try and generate what is always called a bidding war by the media.
To be fair to the player, the suspicion I share with what seems to be an increasing number of City fans that he doesn’t want to come here is based primarily on a story from January when he stated a preference to join Rangers, who were after him back then as well, over Beziktas who’d had a bid, which was smaller than the one we made last week, accepted by Tromso. Indeed, his comments after Tromso’s 1-0 home defeat to Hradec Kralove in the First Leg of a Europa League qualifying tie on Thursday were pretty non committal – essentially he said that he hoped to play in the return leg next week, but if Thursday’s match did turn out to be his last with the club, he hoped supporters wouldn’t just remember him for his missed penalty.
That reads like he’s unlikely to still be a Tromso player by the middle of next week and I have to say that among all of the delay and uncertainty, there is a City fan site, which has a fair sized following, that declared on Thursday I think it was that Dahl was coming to City and the signing should be announced by this Monday. I should mention as well that they said this information came from a Norwegian journalist that was named by the City site – this is something which it might argued gives the claim. some authority. However, as this so called exclusive flies in the face of everything else that is being said about our pursuit of the player currently, it’s hard to conclude anything other than they’re wrong.
Additionally, I go back to something I said last week in that I’m reminded of 2003 when we tried to bring in Rob Hulse and Fitz Hall after our last promotion to the second only for them both to join more established clubs in our new division. In a way I could understand Dahl being more interested in signing for a Championship side, if it was, say, Middlesbrough or Norwich who were bidding for him as opposed to a team that was playing in the EFL’s second tier last season.
Speculating a bit more, maybe if our summer business after being promoted conveyed that we were signing high quality players with an aim to challenge at the top of the table, then that would, surely, make us a more attractive proposition for other targets of ours.
The size of the bid we’ve put in for Dahl strongly suggests we are looking to be involved in the battle for the increased number of Play Off places available. To this end, the local media carried a behind a paywall story late last week about how our pre season was about to “ignite” in the coming days – the implication being that significant news both on and off the field will be coming soon.
The trouble is, we’re no longer a couple of months away from the start of meaningful football. We play our first competitive match a fortnight today and the brutal truth is that, despite what I’d say is BBM’s proven ability to improve players already at the club, our squad has to be judged as weaker than the one we had last season when you consider that we’ve still not replaced Ryan Wintle.
The behind a paywall story I referenced earlier also made mention of under 21 team manager Darren Purse’s decision to become Sligo Rovers’ new manager. Purse leaves with this supporter’s best wishes and thanks for a good job done, but we’ve also lost our goalkeeping coach and possibly the most high profile youth coach we had, along with someone on the analytics side who has joined Leeds, so it’s not just on the field that we’re in need of new faces.
The story suggests that new appointments on the coaching side are not far away, so, it’s just a case of us having to wait for things to ‘ignite”!
On the field, the senior side play at Forest Green this afternoon. I did see something online during the week about Yousef Salech scoring a ninetieth minute goal to give us a 1-0 win somewhere and wondered if it was the game against Crawley that Eli King mentioned last week or maybe I just imagined it – maybe I just imagined what I thought I heard Eli say as well!
A match that definitely took place in. midweek was the under 21s’ creditable goalless draw at Chelsea in what turned out to be Darren Purse’s last game in charge – today, they travel to Torquay for a match which kicks off at midday.
