Weekly Review 27 May 2023.

Around this time last year, I apologised for the lack of pieces like this one in the past few weeks and explained it by saying I was waiting for Cardiff City to publish their retained list of players which should have been forwarded to the EFL some time in mid May.

The retained list was eventually published in mid June shortly before the EFL would have brought it out anyway, so it would seem that the list might well have been filed with the EFL on time (I’m not aware of any sanctions against City for late filing) and the club just didn’t bother telling supporters about it at the time. I can only assume that the same thing is happening this year and we’re seeing yet another example of City failing to communicate with its fanbase. Credit to City for the very reasonable price of 23/24 season tickets, but there is absolutely nothing coming out of the club currently to engage fans at a time when they want us to be buying/renewing season tickets.

On 27 April, City all but secured their place in next season’s Championship with their 2-1 win at Rotherham and they were mathematically safe by the time they wound their home programme up three days later with the 2-1 loss to Huddersfield. You would have thought that from that weekend the plans for 23/24 would have swung into action in terms of sorting the managerial position out and beginning work on the player recruitment which is absolutely essential given how close we came to relegation and three loan players, who were all among our most influential performers over the last three months of the season, leaving.

In the hours after the Huddersfield match, Chairman Mehmet Dalman held a meeting with representatives of supporters’ organisations in which the impression was given that Sabri Lamouchi would be continuing as manager.

In the four weeks which have followed, the only communication from the club has been the surprising news on 16 May that Lamouchi had left the club. As can be seen, the press release was in the short, raises as many questions as it answers style that we usually get from City. However, some media reaction pieces which accompanied it contained the news that the decision to part with Lamouchi had all but been made before a meeting in London between the Frenchman and club owner Vincent Tan had got under way – the Wales Online piece on the decision contained the following words;

“We’re told discussions did not even get around to a budget for players for the new season, with Tan believing Lamouchi’s time was up anyway.“

Actually, there were a few quotes from Mr Dalman again in a BBC piece on 18 May in which I draw your attention to the final sentence in particular.

So, speed was, apparently of the essence, but the proviso that Vincent Tan will have the final say on things is becoming increasingly important in the light of the virtual news black out that fans, and to an extent, media have suffered in the last month or so.

It was reported that Mr Tan was in London as part of a Malaysian delegation for the King’s Coronation on 6 May, so I would assume that his meeting with Lamouchi took place a few days after our final game, at Burnley, on 8 May. It would therefore seem reasonable to assume that City have had close to three weeks to come up with a new manager and, despite the acknowledgement of the need for haste in that BBC piece I linked, there is nothing to indicate that we are close to making an announcement as to who will be leading us into the new season.

Going back to the start of this piece, I mentioned why it took me longer than planned to get the first of these summer reviews out last year, but there is an additional reason why it’s taken me a few weeks to write one this time – apart from what’s been going on at Wales under 17 level over the past week or so (more on that later), there has been absolutely no worthwhile City news to write about!

Although we’re now into the quieter close season period, ordinarilly, this would be a time when the local media especially would be full of speculation about the vacant manager’s post and the identity of players we’ll be looking to sign in the coming weeks, but there’s been hardly anything.

I go on to the Cardiff City News Now feed all of the time, but the sense of expectation I usually have when checking it while we’re looking for a new manager is completely absent because in the last fortnight or so there has been whole days go by without a single City story appearing on it such is the lack of anything for the media to feed off.

There was vague speculation this week that City would be looking abroad for their next managerial appointment with mentions for Turkey, France and Italy I believe it was (to be honest, I’m losing interest in the whole thing now, so I might be wrong there) from mainland Europe and the USA also coming up as a possible base for some of those we’ve targetted.

Closer to home, a Daily Telegraph journalist tweeted about a fortnight ago that the job was Sol Bamba’s if he wanted it, but the one that really says it all about how farcical the whole thing has become was the story that Vincent Tan has a “soft spot” for Steve Morison and was prepared to offer the man he sacked after just ten games of the 22/23 season back in September his old job back!

My opinion of Steve Morison has always been the same, I was never a great fan of his and would not have been bothered if Tan had sacked him after the 4-0 home humiliation by Swansea towards the end of the 21/22 campaign, Instead, Tan backed him to carry out the complete squad rebuild which was required last summer and then, having spent months believing there very little cash available for paying transfer fees, supporters were surprised to see £1.5 million being paid for Callum Robinson. On the face of it, this was a big endorsement of his manager by Mr Tan, except that he then decided to sack Morison a fortnight later!

I called Morison’s sacking the most ludicrous managerial dismissal in City’s history, but to bring him back some nine months later would be more ludicrous still and, if there is any truth in the story, then the club is an even bigger laughing stock than I think it is.

Let’s be clear about this, Morison’s name has cropped up as a possible candidate for a vacant bosses job at one or two clubs over the winter (Swindon springs to mind), but everything suggests that he is just another typical former Cardiff manager.

I’ll explain what I mean by that. In October it will be the sixtieth anniversary of my first City game (using the word “celebrate” doesn’t seem appropriate currently!) and, in all of that time, the only manager I’d definitely say has been “poached” by another club in what could without question be called an upwards move is Len Ashurst when he went from Second Division to First by being appointed Sunderland boss in 1984. Even then, you wonder if he’d have got that job if he’d not been a Wearside legend after playing more than four hundred times for Sunderland in the league.

I daresay you could make claims about people like Frank O’Farrell, Frank Burrows, Phil Neal and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer being City managers who left the club to go higher in the football world, but I’m not convinced by any of them. Ashurst is the only one whose work as a Cardiff manager got a “bigger” club interested in him and, when he left, it was not to become an Assistant to someone else like Burrows and Neal did.

The point is that Morison is like so many one time City managers who either never return to management or have to go down to a lower level to restart their managerial career after an unsuccessful time of it at their previous club.

The truth is that City have always been crap at picking managers if you measure success as the standing of the club they leave us for – looking back further than my first game, our record was not great then either. So, it’s not just under Vincent Tan that we’ve made poor, uninspiring and unsuccessful managerial appointments, but, especially in terms of quality of football, Tan has taken us into unchartered territory with what looks a very odd and mediocre collection of appointments.

When trying to figure out why this should be, you do, of course, have to factor in that all of the evidence of his dozen years and more as our owner screams out that Vincent Tan doesn’t “get” football, but, for me, there’s more to it than that.

I go back to the revelation that back in 13/14 after Malky Mackay had been sacked, Sir Alex Ferguson advised Ole Gunnar Solskjaer not to take the City job when it was offered to him. The man who is the best domestic manager of my lifetime’s judgment about my club as a place that an up and coming manager should not be interested in is not unique either.

Indeed, only this week, Jason Perry, in a Q and A session with Supporters’ Trust members suggested that managers see a move to Cardiff as possibly being detrimental to their career prospects. In doing so, Perry joined former City caretaker boss Danny Gabbidon who had said much the same thing in a recent episode of the Elis James Feast of Football podcast.

That’s the thing, Alex Ferguson was able to see that Cardiff was a possible managerial graveyard almost a decade ago and, in the intervening period it seems to me that this has come to apply even more.

Vincent Tan attracted a lot of criticism during our first season in the Premier League in 13/14 and, to be fair, the worst of it had an element of racism to it. However, there were also sound reasons for feeling that much of it was justified. The rebranding of the club’s kit was the biggest early example of Tan’s faulty footballing judgment, but, in the long term, I would argue that more damaging has been a lack of trust in “footballing people” which it seems stems from the Mackay/Moody episode that has held us back. As confirmed by the current Chairman, it is still holding us back – the lack of a Director of Football type of appointment is a huge problem in my book even though I did read someone make the very reasonable point that Tan would probably fall out with and sack such a person in no time at all if one was ever appointed.

If it is true that the quality of applicant when the Cardiff job becomes available is not of the calibre you would expect for a club of our size, then that may explain this feeling that nothing seems to be happening this time as we hunt yet again for a new manager. It might also explain why the club may be having to look abroad for candidates to fill the post – the cat is already out of the bag about Cardiff in the UK.

Despite our lack of on pitch success, the Cardiff job should still be one to attract some decent quality applicants even if our future is still unclear because of the ongoing Emiliano Sala cases. and the transfer embargo imposed because, bizarrely, we paid the first instalment of the transfer fee to Nantes, but not within the required timescale. This from a club that’s original defence in the courts was that they had made an error in the paperwork when completing the deal.

It’s all suggestive of a poorly run, error prone club and I’m afraid that I’ve now reached the stage where I have no great sense of expectation when the identity of our new manager eventually becomes known. There is no evidence at all which suggests that City will appoint someone who would get those season ticket sales climbing – quite the opposite I’m afraid.

I’ll finish this section off by saying that Luton face Coventry in the Play Off Final today. Whichever side wins, it will be a fantastic story of triumph over adversity when you consider that Luton were in the National League when Fergie was advising Ole not to become our manager and Coventry were in League Two when we achieved, and then wasted, our second promotion to the Premier League under Vincent Tan.

If it is to be Luton who go up, that will have much to do with the two Welshmen who have been their manager in recent times. Nathan Jones laid the considerable groundwork and Rob Edwards has taken over since the autumn. Rhondda born Jones is a former City player who is widely reported as being a fan of the club and was criticised by some for the manner of his celebrations when Luton won at Swansea in 21/22,

Jones is available now and wants to get back into management after his horror spell at Southampton, so, on the face of it, he’d be an ideal choice for the City job, but, instead, if he’s going to be appointed as manager of a south Wales club this summer, it looks much more likely it’ll be of the jacks!

Similarly, Edwards was free and available at the time we were looking for a manager after Morison’s dismissal after becoming Watford’s first sacked manager of the season. Like Jones, Edwards wouldn’t have cost us a penny in compensation and yet there was nothing to indicate we were interested in him (or could it be a case of him, and Jones, not being interested in us?).

When you consider the advantages Vincent Tan’s money should have given us over the two clubs playing for a place in the top flight today, there should be embarrassment at Cardiff City Stadium as to, first, how the huge opportunity we were handed has been wasted and, second, that, we are in a worse position on and off the pitch than we were before our owner arrived at the club.

I’m sure some will dispute my contention that we’re worse off when it comes to off pitch matters when they remember all of those threats of Administration and winding up orders under Peter Ridsdale, so, perhaps, I should add the word “potentially” to it.

There was a time when I’d look at our huge debt (much bigger than it was under Sam Hammam or Ridsdale), but be reassured by more knowledgeable voices saying that all of it was owed to Vincent Tan, so it wasn’t a problem

However, that has changed in recent years, Mehmet Dalman (or a company he’s associated with at least) is also owed millions by City and the latest accounts contain a mention of a further loan totalling millions from another party which remains unidentified at this stage – I’m not an expert, but there seems to be more potential around now for things to turn distinctly awkward for us financially.

This has been a pretty bleak read up to now so it’s good that I can end on what is a better news story – partially so at least. In fact, scrub that, I think this is a very encouraging story which, hopefully, means that we might be seeing the emergence of the best group of payers to come out of our Academy, in terms of strength in depth, since its inception nineteen years ago.

I’d already written on here about how the national Under 17s had become the first Welsh side at age group level to qualify for a major tournament since 1981, well they’re now back from having taken part in the Euros in Hungary and, although they fell at the first hurdle (i.e. the group stage), I’d say they came out of it with their honour intact.

I’m often quite critical of City’s Academy, but you’ve got to credit them for the number of current and former Academy members in the Welsh squad for the Euros – if wasn’t quite domination, but it wasn’t far short of it.

Captain Charlie Crew of Leeds was Wales’ best player for me. The midfielder looked a fine prospect and it’s a bit galling to think that at the back end of last season he’d played for our Under 21s as a fifteen year old before signing for the Yorkshire club, who will, almost certainly be in the same division as us next season, last summer. Similarly, forward Gabriela Biancheri was at City until January when he signed for Manchester United, while the team’s leading scorer Iwan Morgan of Swansea is also another ex City Academy player.

Even so, the original squad selection still contained seven current members of our Academy. Goalkeepers Luke Armstrong and Lewys Benjamin, centreback Dylan Lawlor, full back/wing back Luey Giles, Josh Beecher, who it seems can play anywhere on the left, midfielder Troy Perret and winger/attacking midfielder Cody Twose all were in the original squad and they were joined by central defender Alyas Debono when an injury necessitated a further change.

All bar Benjamin saw some game time in the tournament, Lawlor started all three matches, Armstrong, Giles, Beecher and Perrett two, while Twose started one and came on as a sub in another and there was a substitute appearance for Debono in the final match.

All three games Wales played ended up with a 3-0 scoreline. Despite dominating the opening half, two great chances missed at 0-0 by the same player (not one of the City contingent) cost them dear as a goal just before the interval followed by two more towards the end of the game gave heir Hungarian hosts a very flattering win.

By contrast, the Irish were dominant throughout their meeting with us and Wales could have no complaints about a defeat which confirmed their departure from the tournament despite them still having a game to play.

Wales responded to that disappointment superbly though and looked set for an honourable goalless draw against a Polish side which had stuck five on the two sides we’d played beforehand going into the last eight minutes when Biancheri nodded them ahead. Morgan then weighed in with a couple more goals of his own and Wales, who had been been the better team in the second half, came through to win comfortably in the end.

From a City perspective, I was most impressed by Josh Beecher I think who, besides doing a good job defensively in both of his games looked a creative player going forward – indeed, with an effort against the woodwork and a couple of shots saved by the keeper, he was Wales’ greatest attacking threat against Poland until the late goal rush.

While all eight City players now face the toughest part of their efforts to become a senior footballer as they start the stage which sees a possible transition from young hopeful to first team member, and it’s a process that the club have not been great at mastering for much too long now, you’d like to think that, this time, the sheer number we have performing at such an elevated level will mean that one or two of them at least are potential first teamers for us.