What’s that line about the more I practice, the luckier I get?

The line I use in the title has its origins in golf with some attributing its first use to Ben Hogan, but it definitely appears in a book written by Gary Player where he credits it to Jerry Barber, a name that is new to me but was good enough to win a US PGA title and hold the record as the oldest player to appear in a PGA event shortly before his death in 1994 at the age of seventy eight, who was a renowned performer from bunkers in the fifties and sixties.

While the quote doesn’t quite fit the manner of Cardiff City’s rather fortunate 1-1 draw with Sheffield United at Bramall Lane last night, it is appropriate I believe in that it testifies that getting into the right habits can gain you rewards that may not be deserved on the “balance of play”.

Back in October, City went to Birmingham to play a Friday night televised game at the top of the Championship as league leaders and gave a lacklustre and unconvincing performance to lose 1-0 – they could have few complaints about the outcome against opponents who were in the bottom three at the time.

Just after Christmas, we lost another televised match 1-0 at home to Preston in what may well have been the worst league game we’ve been involved in this season – Preston were one of the poorest visiting teams seen at Cardiff City Stadium over the past eight months and yet they were definitely better than us on the night.

City got what they deserved from both games, but, when you look at a few of the matches we have played since our last league defeat, at QPR on New Years Day, then a case can be made for saying that they have discovered the knack of coming out of matches where they have been second best with results which left the opposition thinking that justice had not been done.

Last night’s match was only the third Championship fixture that we have not won since that afternoon at Loftus Road when the notion that we would be strong favourites to secure an automatic promotion place seemed ridiculous..

We weren’t very good in our first visit to Sheffield when we ground out a goalless draw at Hillsborough against an out of form Wednesday side that had more of a claim for the three points than we did. A few weeks later, we were at Millwall for another televised fixture and, although the match is probably remembered most for the wrongly disallowed late goal by Sol Bamba now, the truth is that, after a bright start which saw us score very early on through Junior Hoilett, we could count ourselves fortunate to get out of the New Den with a 1-1 draw. Millwall could claim to have been the better side for a period of about an hour either side of short spells where it was us who were forcing the issue.

The fact is though that getting a draw at Millwall has become a very creditable outcome in recent months as Neil Harris is emerging as the only real alternative to Neil Warnock in most people’s eyes when it comes to naming a Championship manager of the season. City rode their luck at times when they played there, but they found a way of getting something from the game and, indeed, left cursing that a blunder by referee Keith Stroud had cost them the win.

“Finding a way” was a phrase used by Sky’s studio analysts after last night’s match in which I’d say it could definitely be argued that Sheffield United would have been justified in feeling a stronger sense of injustice than either their city rivals or Millwall could have done after they had entertained us.

If the harder I practice line was one thing that popped into my mind as the final whistle blew last night, another, probably more pertinent, one was to recall a game from about two and a half years ago involving the team Neil Warnock would like to base any Premier League campaign we may face in the near future on.

Back in November 2015, Burnley came here and ran into one of City’s better performances of the season where we, somehow, stayed in the Play Off hunt until the heavy defeat at Sheffield Wednesday in our penultimate match of the 15/16 campaign.

My report on that game confirms the impression I had yesterday that we had plenty to feel hard done by as Burnley, through German striker Rouwen Hennings’ only goal for the club and a freakish own goal by the unfortunate Matt Connolly, scored twice from the eighty fifth minute onward to turn a 2-0 deficit into a 2-2 draw in horrendous conditions.

City did not deserve one point that day, they deserved three. However, as I touch upon in my report, Burnley, even at that stage under Sean Dyche, had already established a reputation as a side that did not know when they were beaten – 2-0 up with five minutes of regular time to go is a winning lead against most teams, but Burnley had done enough over a period of two or three years under Dyche to let City know that they would need to be vigilant in guarding their advantage.

In the end, despite this knowledge, we still couldn’t hang on and, although I’m not saying that we are yet at the stage that Burnley were two seasons ago, it was Sheffield United who found themselves in a similar position last night. To repeat, we have not yet earned the sort of reputation Burnley had, but it’s undeniably true that one of the reasons for our success this season is that there has been a transformation from being a side that, largely, was in the habit of dropping points by conceding late goals in 16/17 to a situation where we have become one that is in the habit of picking up points by scoring late goals in 17/18.

When your team is a goal down going into added time, there is always the, usually forlorn, hope that they can still find an equaliser from somewhere, the difference this season is that, poorly though we had played by our standards, the goal we scored in the ninety first minute didn’t come as a total surprise to me.

Going back to Burnley in 2015/16, on Boxing Day they were beaten 3-0 at Hull to record their third defeat in the five matches they had played since their draw down here. This was their equivalent of the “blip” we had during the Christmas/New Year holiday period this season, but while our response has been very impressive, Burnley’s was truly magnificent.

After the setback at Hull, Burnley went unbeaten for the rest of the season as the next twenty three matches (half a Championship season) saw them win sixteen times and draw seven to finish as Champions. Yet, my memory is that it took a long time for the critics to become convinced that they were the real deal – certainly, I used to watch them during that time and think there were three or four more naturally talented squads in the league than them.

We’ve got ourselves into a position where it’s not essential that we go unbeaten for the rest of the season (indeed, it’s certainly conceivable now that we could lose four of our last seven matches and still finish in the top two), but the job is still to be finished and so the difference between ourselves and the Burnley team of two years ago is that we’re still aspiring to what they were able to achieve.

Burnley didn’t always convince on their run in to the title. Indeed, it will be two years to the day on Thursday when we went to Turf Moor and, perhaps, edged a goalless draw in which Kenneth Zohore came off the bench to give one of those fleeting early appearances of his which suggested we, perhaps, could have a player on our hands.

Their stalemate with us was Burnley’s third consecutive draw, but they responded to this “crisis” by winning five out of their final six games to end up with ninety three points in the season where Brighton managed to garner eighty nine of them and still didn’t go up!

Moving on to last night’s game, I won’t say as much as I usually do about matches because I would have thought nearly everyone who reads this will have watched the game either in the flesh or on the telly.

However, having centred my piece on Friday’s win over Burton on the return to their early season form by the trio of forwards that Championship sides could not cope with back in August, it was ironic (some may say embarrassing for me!) that Messrs Zohore, Hoilett and Mendez-Laing were the three players withdrawn as Neil Warnock strove to come up with something which would deny Sheffield United the superiority they had enjoyed for virtually the whole game.

The Blades had played very well at Brentford on Friday apparently in drawing 1-1 and were unbeaten in four going into last night’s game as what had become a stuttering Play Off challenge has been transformed into a situation where they have as good a chance as anyone, and better than many, of taking one of the two places seemingly still up for grabs behind the current top four.

I think it’s probably fair to say that the Blades’ need for three points was greater than ours (Neil Warnock had said he would accept a point from Bramall Lane in one of his pre match interviews even though it would mean we would come up one short of equaling the club record of nine consecutive league wins). This was illustrated as early as the second minutes when midfield man John Lundstram was one of four home players in the penalty area ready to contest a cross from the left in open play – he got his head on the ball and should really have done better than head straight at Neil Etheridge.

Without doing much at all to threaten the home goal after that, City had began to look fairly comfortable when the home team took a slightly fortuitous lead in the twenty eighth minute when some patient passing,which saw some of their players taking the ball out of the opposition penalty area in a manner which I could never imagine us doing, saw an opening worked for Leon Clarke who scored his first goal in eleven games with a shot which trickled apologetically over the line with Etheridge helpless following a deflection off Bruno Manga.

While the goal owed something to good fortune, what followed over the next hour was largely continuous Sheffield United superiority as their midfield trio of Lundstrom, the influential John Fleck and impressive Welshman Lee Evans gained a superiority over the off colour Callum Paterson and Marko Grujic. These two were backed up by an Aron Gunnarsson who was always going to find a full ninety minutes on a strength sapping pitch a much bigger test than Friday’s twenty minute cameo over opponents that (unlike Burnley in 15/16) knew that they were beaten at two goals down going into the game’s final quarter.

That said, when Warnock withdrew Mendez-Laing at half time and, for the first time since the match at Ipswich almost two months ago, reunited the Zohore/Gary Madine strike partnership, it was the Icelandic captain who provide the driving run down the right past two opponents and low cross cum shot, that Grujic missed by inches, which provided our best attacking moment up to then.

Zohore, with a pacy run past two defenders then tested ex City keeper Simon Moore with a powerful shot that was palmed over and it looked, perhaps, as if we were establishing a superiority. The home team reasserted themselves though when Fleck’s quick free kick took advantage of a dozing City rearguard and sub Clayton Donaldson should have done better than shoot against the post from about eight yards out.

A second home goal continued to appear more likely than an away equaliser right up to the end of normal time with the introduction of Yanic Wildschut and Anthony Pilkington looking to have little effect on proceedings.

However, when Manga launched it long after his initial free kick had been dealt with as the clock showed one minute over the ninety played, Grujic and Madine won headers which saw the ball drop on to Pilks’ right foot some twelve yards from goal. The Republic of Ireland international has been very much a squad member only this season and, after a spell of three goals in four matches in January, had featured for just ten minutes against Bolton during February and March, but you knew what the studio analysts meant when they said that the chance had fallen to the right person because, technically, there are few better on our books than Pilkington and he made a difficult opportunity look a lot easier than it was by volleying across Moore and into the corner of the net.

Any City fan watching must have known that this was, potentially, a huge moment in our season – it certainly looked like that out on the pitch in the celebrations which followed!

Having made a comparison with one promotion winning side, I’ll finish with a similarity with another one – the City squad of 12/13 had nobody who even came close to being a prolific scorer and, barring someone like Zohore, Paterson or Hoilett going absolutely goal crazy over the next month or so, it’s going to be a seventh consecutive season where no Cardiff player has made it to twenty goals. However, just as in 12/13, this is a campaign where goals are going to be shared out among many of the squad. Given his record of five goals in ten appearances (only three of them being starts) in all competitions this season, Pilkington’s name should never be forgotten if 17/18 finishes as we all want it to – last night his goal ensured that it was very much a point gained, as opposed to two lost, for his team.